MASTERCLASS

Flowers of the Sky (a medieval term for comets) draws on two panoramic photographs, found in a Los Angeles thrift shop, that depict a gathering of members of the Eastern Star, a Masonic order. In the first photograph, taken at a banquet meal, the participants are seated at tables and facing the camera. In the second photograph, everyone is dressed in ritual robes, looking away from the camera and towards a stage. A single figure stands there, centered on this platform, and faces them. Everyone is suspended, expectant.

Through isolating parts of the photographs and highlighting the different groupings of the Eastern Star members, Flowers of the Sky reveals and obscures the original events. There is a sense, looking at the photographs, of watching and waiting for something to happen, something beyond the experience of daily life. And something does. Nature reasserts herself, the figures double, vibrate, and rise, trying to escape their emulsive lives, suggesting a rapture that extends beyond their printed world.

"The starting point for Valeria Street was a box of seven slides that had fallen from a shelf in my studio. The slides depict a group of men, posed around a table, looking at a set of documents. They are in a generic office setting, with the blinds closed. Each slide is a different framing of the same event – clearly staged for the camera. In the center, seated, is one man. He holds a pen in his left hand. When I looked at the images, magnified through the camera lens, I saw that this was my father.

In recent films, I've been obsessed with unearthing possible and impossible narratives from photographs of strangers. Not knowing their histories, I’m able to imagine/construct new histories, while attempting to unearth something essential about these photographic documents. I was intrigued and somewhat frightened by the idea of working with these photographs of my father. The images suggest something about work and family, and how much of a life is lived outside of each other's eyes." — Janie Geiser

Three empty photo albums, vessels of lost time and memory beyond reach.

A time clash in suspended time, light-years away and light-years long. A house/home is imagined and re-imagined, inhabited by a family who never met. They leave and return. This goes on and on and on.

22 Light-years draws on a range of visual sources, including photographic negatives, diagrams, found patterned papers, and archival footage. These sources merge, sometimes uncomfortably, with video that was screen-recorded while operating a home-designer desktop software program. Creating digital floor plans, landscaping, and roofless homes in real time, and manipulating this imagery away from the software's intent, Geiser fabricates a digitally lush, elliptical, uncanny world, where endless planning never results in a tangible home. Combined with tangible collage materials (negatives, diagrams, flower seed packets) that are filmed frame by frame, the material world wears the skin of the immaterial one, they bleed together, suggesting time as simultaneous, mutable, and unknown.