Willie Varela

A poignant portrait of Stan and Jane Brakhage visiting Juarez.

A film by Willie Varela

Varela's reflections on home and place before embarking on one of his major life changes, moving from El Paso to San Francisco.

The filmmaker documents both public-facing aspects of his life as an artist and more personal details about marriage and fatherhood in this long-form diary film.

A poetic study of the Concordia Cemetery.

2004, video, sound, 16:37

A poignant portrait of Stan and Jane Brakhage visiting Juarez.

A film by Willie Varela

Varela's reflections on home and place before embarking on one of his major life changes, moving from El Paso to San Francisco.

The filmmaker documents both public-facing aspects of his life as an artist and more personal details about marriage and fatherhood in this long-form diary film.

A poetic study of the Concordia Cemetery.

2004, video, sound, 16:37

A Super-8 film by Willie Varela

A light study of surfaces, shapes and colors, ending with a silhouette shot of a woman's mouth

Literally, ‘Together in Life, United in Death.' Writing found on a gravestone in a cemetery in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. Death's shadow everywhere.

A game of intuitive stops and starts.

One of Varela's luminous abstractions of the moon.

A film by Willie Varela

"Ghost Town is a study of wrecked buildings, Varela's camera panning across the strange beauty of the rusted metal, broken glass, and rotting wood of the structures, eventually discovering another symbol of time, a tree that Varela animates by his dynamic exploration." Stephen Broomer

Super 8, silent, 3:17.

Glimpses of life on the run. Shot in Juarez, Mexico, Austin and El Paso.

A Super-8 diary portrait by Willie Varela

A film in the Moon Trilogy by Willie Varela

Compiles scenes from medical films; observations of street life; scenes of protest in San Francisco, in the aftermath of Harvey Milk's assassination; and images from mass media (break dancing, rocket launches, Reagan at the start of his second term), all with the characteristic skip of the television set's signal.

A study of sunlight refracted through drinking glasses.

Filmmaker George Kuchar relates various childhood traumas, including his obsession with the ‘lean people'.

8mm film that restricts itself to material shot in a San Antonio motel room and an apartment in El Paso.

The third part of Willie Varela's Moon trilogy.

A silent Super 8 film by Willie Varela.

The tensions between the beauty and decay of death.

A document of a family celebration in a suburban backyard.

"A series of catalogs of light, "light journals" if you will, dealing with everyday, ordinary realities in such a way that the surrounding light becomes tactile and intimately expressive." -WV

A straightforward documentation of a performance by the Voladores given in Dolores Park, San Francisco, in June of 1984.

Life in a goldfish bowl

"Varela’s use of the diptych form suggests many things: a Warholian endorsement of dispersed attention, a citation to image-in-image news media, an act of forced similitude. Unlike Warhol’s treatment of the diptych, Varela is not ambivalent to these images, which shift between personal observation, archival materials, commercial and news images, all cited to state an unambiguous outrage[...] the whole of it is weighted with heavy omens, that this age of cruelty and menace is still only in its infancy." -Stephen Broomer

As Varela moved on from film, working with video from the 1990s to the present, the spiritual and autobiographic concerns of his work remained, evidenced in the longer works that conclude this programme, works in contemplation of sacred and profane experience. His Hidden Presence continues the multiform, ‘found’ image construction of In Progress, accommodating a collage soundtrack of electronic beats, a distorting, looping horn, and a loop of the Velvet Underground, to accompany surreal and horrific scenes of wrestling and crucifixions, as well as diaristic photography.

Representative of Varela’s early practice, this piece elevates the aesthetic value of otherwise dismissed environments.