Janie Geiser

This ain’t no Pixar. This is ain’t no Disney. This ain’t no foolin’ around. ANXIOUS ANIMATION presents six contemporary film artists who take us into surreal worlds of delirium and paranoia… The reigning proponent of cut-and-paste, LEWIS KLAHR nourishes intensely private visions on the compost heap of collective fantasy through old magazines, comic books, and cocktail iconography.Complex, full of charm, and pervaded by themes of loss, JANIE GEISER simultaneously creates and deconstructs fantasies through doll-like figurines, cut-outs, and found objects in her cryptic narratives.JIM TRAINOR’s handmade animations explore the inner lives of animals that appear strangely self-aware even as they instinctually copulate, feed, fight, kill and die.The Bay Area collective of RODNEY ASCHER, SYD GARON, and ERIC HENRY conjure diabolical visions with digital savvy, accompanied by the manic music of Buckethead and DJ Q-Bert.

In her recent films, Geiser has been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a kind of deep, ambiguous space, a suggestion of “the floating world”. In ULTIMA THULE, gravity fails, land and sky lose their historical meaning. A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over barely-glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ”Ultima Thule”: the farthest point north, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time loses its line.

Fluorescent light reflects on a girl's image, while looking at book of photographs by Paul Strand in a New Hampshire bookstore.

Evidence is scientifically arranged and catalogued, suggesting a corridor to knowledge. Elusive. Crimson.

In KINDLESS VILLAIN, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while the history of never-ending battle forms traces in the waters below. Seemingly alone in their island world, the boys succumb to fatigue, and to rituals of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet reveal a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child's game, played quietly in this forgotten world.

“A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter-day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelopes, botanical and anatomical illustrations, and found recordings reorder themselves, collapsing and reemerging in her liminal world.”—Janie Geiser

This ain’t no Pixar. This is ain’t no Disney. This ain’t no foolin’ around. ANXIOUS ANIMATION presents six contemporary film artists who take us into surreal worlds of delirium and paranoia… The reigning proponent of cut-and-paste, LEWIS KLAHR nourishes intensely private visions on the compost heap of collective fantasy through old magazines, comic books, and cocktail iconography.Complex, full of charm, and pervaded by themes of loss, JANIE GEISER simultaneously creates and deconstructs fantasies through doll-like figurines, cut-outs, and found objects in her cryptic narratives.JIM TRAINOR’s handmade animations explore the inner lives of animals that appear strangely self-aware even as they instinctually copulate, feed, fight, kill and die.The Bay Area collective of RODNEY ASCHER, SYD GARON, and ERIC HENRY conjure diabolical visions with digital savvy, accompanied by the manic music of Buckethead and DJ Q-Bert.

In her recent films, Geiser has been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a kind of deep, ambiguous space, a suggestion of “the floating world”. In ULTIMA THULE, gravity fails, land and sky lose their historical meaning. A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over barely-glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ”Ultima Thule”: the farthest point north, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time loses its line.

Fluorescent light reflects on a girl's image, while looking at book of photographs by Paul Strand in a New Hampshire bookstore.

Evidence is scientifically arranged and catalogued, suggesting a corridor to knowledge. Elusive. Crimson.

In KINDLESS VILLAIN, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while the history of never-ending battle forms traces in the waters below. Seemingly alone in their island world, the boys succumb to fatigue, and to rituals of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet reveal a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child's game, played quietly in this forgotten world.

“A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter-day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelopes, botanical and anatomical illustrations, and found recordings reorder themselves, collapsing and reemerging in her liminal world.”—Janie Geiser

A nine-part serial about a woman hypnotist, Marceline, and her journey across an ever-changing landscape. A term used during the 19th century, “magnetic sleep” refers to the hypnotic trances that German physician Franz Mesmer induced in patients with the aid of magnetic and electrical forces.

Slideshow reveals moments in time in the lives of strangers. Strangers to me, but maybe not to each other. Found in a Berlin flea market in the 1990's, these slides originated in the DDR (East Germany):an embossed DDR decorates the top of many of the vivid plastic slide frames. The slides' photographic images were made of ephemeral materials. As objects, they have a certain graphic power, especially when illuminated on a light table. Scattered among the boxed-up slides were also a few educational slides highlighting working sites. Additionally, there seem to be a few commercially produced images of soldiers, the border---these were in cardboard slide frames and may have been produced by West German companies. Time and place are suggested---sometime before 1989, when the wall came down. Working with the slides, I came to feel that I knew some of the people. Many emerged across multiple slides. But I can only know their traces.

Initiated by an unearthed photograph of her father and his colleagues around a conference table in a generic mid-century office, Geiser’s evocative collage film charts a personal-political path through the recesses of America’s industrial ecosystem. Using animation and re-photography effects, Geiser presents an array of images (geometric diagrams, blueprints, live-action landscape shots) in a prismatic reflection on power structures in the workplace.

A found faded set of vermillion 35mm slides—evidence of time and change. Their red hues transform the slides’ subjects—mountain landscapes of the West, long-span bridges, tourists and tourist sites—into simultaneously sublime and corrosive views. In Chameleon Law, these time-altered images, alternately depleted and extreme, suggest a heated landscape of the past and future.

Medical illustrations of bodies, with model paper buildings and images of cultivated and wild plants in an elliptical journey toward ephemerality. These bodies lose their volume and exist, somehow, without flesh. They are mere outlines, traveling through indeterminate space, domestic and otherwise. Cut open, but not bleeding, what do we see when we no longer have eyes?

The realms of childhood, war, and loss echo through Ricky. Double vision illuminates, and simultaneously obfuscates, what can be remembered, lost, or retrieved. A found sound recording forms the spine of the film . . . a scratched audio letter from father to son.—Janie Geiser

LOST MOTION uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers and other found objects to follow a man’s search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train which never arrives. His wanderings lead him to the other side of the tracks, a forgotten landscape of derelict erector-set buildings populated by lost souls. Dream merges with nightmare in this post-industrial land of vivid night.

This movie is an overview of the history and practice of Toy Theater. Each frame is on for 5 seconds, but you can pause it if you need it on longer.

A subterranean unraveling, seeds fall to the ground with nowhere to land. The only witness is blindfolded, and she, too, falls at some point. The underground factory operates day and night, the burrowing continues, in a long slow attempt to fabricate what could actually make itself.

Short experimental animation by Janie Geiser

IMMER ZU is an elliptical, experimental animated film which evokes a mysterious undercover world of secret messages, cryptic language and indecipherable codes. Shot in luminous black and white, IMMER ZU uses miniature two and three dimensional figures and sets, as well as shadow puppetry, to suggest the urgency of a nocturnal mission, a mission of life and death importance. In this dark and richly atmospheric film, with a soundtrack collaged from several film noirs, meaning is constantly covered and uncovered in a shadowed journey toward eclipse.

Video tape of a performance

A chance stereo view from a Vaporetto (water bus) ride in Venice, 2019.

From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. ARBOR suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and the introduction of natural elements, including flowers and leaves. The photographs’ subjects rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of ARBOR cycle through their one elusive afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know---and becoming shadows in their own stories.

In the early part of the 20th Century, Los Angeles, with its warm, dry climate, was a haven for the chronically ill. Working from archival images of pre-suburban Los Angeles, medical illustrations, charts, photographs of abandoned hospitals and miniatures, Silent Sister centers on the intersection of landscape and the body; both become the location of narrative, memory, erasure, history and loss.

Janie Geiser takes us along on her search for the original meaning of the word 'algebra' with the help of a remarkable series of found objects, medical illustrations and a rich variety of animation techniques.

A girl escapes from a house where parental conflicts seem to hammer down the roof. Gliding through a dream-like environment, in her newfound freedom she encounters dangerous hurdles. Returning home, she discovers she has undergone an Alice in Wonderland-like change in scale and no longer fits in the confined boxes of family security. Her parents watch their now giant daughter through the window.

Images of impending disaster (slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill and a frayed, almost snapping elevator rope) collide with the repeated image of a woman's body, cycling toward ephemerality as the woman disappears into the texture of the film itself. In her recent films, Geiser has been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a lush, disorienting, ambiguous film space and an atmosphere of temporal suspension. In TERRACE 49, the space is shattered further, broken into shards: as fractured as memory and as fragile as glass.

A found psychological test kit yields puzzle figures with cutout ears, cutoff heads, and pullaway body parts. The ear opens into an interior world of shifting science book images which, when isolated, evoke mysteries more than they reveal facts.

Rivers run red, planes hover above the water, ships travel in darkness, and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target.

An elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac.

Shots of empty photo albums.

THE SECRET STORY arose as a response to several beautifully decayed toy figures from the 1930s that were given to me as a gift. These figures, and other toys, objects, and illustrations that I found from the period between the world wars, suggested a kind of unearthed hidden narrative which I have attempted to re-piece together, as if these figures were the hieroglyphics of a just-forgotten tongue. THE SECRET STORY revolves around the central figure of the woman, and her girl-double, who look somewhat like a versions of Snow White. She wanders through landscapes of rivers and floods, home and war, and memory and illness, culminating in an ecstatic walk in the forest, suggesting both the dark and cathartic trajectories of the richest fairy tales.

In a shifting landscape of dirt and sky, excavation and construction merge. Figures move back and forth between life and death, and possibly somewhere else. The ephemerality of existence is a mundane question in this world, where numbers mark the way. The floor of the world turns out to be easily pierced, liquid, permeable.

Seeking and grasping at what is hidden from our eyes. Haunting moments of surrealism that extract us from the everyday into a realm of magic and music.

The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last watch before morning was called the fourth watch. In the hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film figures occupying the flickering space in a midcentury house made of printed tin. Their presence is at once inevitable and uncanny. A boy turns his head in dread, a woman’s eyes look askance, a sleepwalker reaches into a cabinet that dissolves with her touch, and hands write letters behind ephemeral windows. The rooms reveal themselves and fill with impossible, shadowed light. It is not clear who is watching and who is trespassing in this nocturnal drama of lost souls.

In Flower of the Sky, Janie Geiser elegantly submits two thrifted photographs to superimpositions and masking techniques in order to trouble and recast histories of the early 20th century.

Look and Learn explores the juxtaposition of two material image forms: visual instructions (assembly guides, photography manuals, diagrams) and photographs––mainly set of several 1950's era elementary school group photographs.

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 desktop home design software. By creating digital floor plans, landscaping, and roofless homes in real time, and manipulating those videos to move them further away from the software’s intent, Geiser fabricates a digitally lush, elliptical, uncanny world, where home planning never results in a tangible home. The familiar material elements (negatives, diagrams, flower seed packets) wear the skin of the immaterial realm, suggesting time as simultaneous, mutable, and unknown. (janiegeiser.com)