Jennifer Reeves

Exhumed motion-pictures from my very own Elkhart, Indiana landfill constitute the canvas of this obsessively hand-painted film. This is my anti-landfill film, an attempt to transform 16mm out-takes into a meditation on nature's losing battle to decompose our relics of abandoned technologies and productions. Primal screams from the wilderness rise until they are buried in silence.

CHRONIC is an experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.

Primordial sounds and organic creatures evoke the moment when life began.

"Appropriated audio from motivational tapes and raw hewn video footage of the exploits of two punk girls creating a disturbance in an Ohio Mall (circa 1988) challenge the great society of the American heartland. A savvy examination of hard-edge adolescent aggression and an attack on "proper" codes of behavior. The future is yours." -Karyn Riegel, Occularis film series.

Anything but gray, a color explosion sparkles, bubbles, and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this exuberant, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. But it speaks of the end of one era or another, a time for letting go and celebration. Control triumphs over disorder. Reeves mixed samples from rusty, dusty old machines, records, and electric waves to create an aural passage through technological progress.

A dark and sensual experimental narrative that explores a skilled technical worker's fantasies during her nights as a femme in the lower east side of New York.

The story of a beautiful young Russian violin virtuoso who arrives in New York in nineteen-thirteen and quickly falls in love with a demimondain, who introduces her to the speakeasies, opium dens, and dark places of the City. Rebecca's experiences with opium intertwine with her obsession for the stranger until she cannot separate one passion from the other. This leads her inexorably to a terrible fall from grace and an indeterminate future. [Overview courtesy of IMDB]

The film rejoices the splendor of nature as the camera eye traverses land and sea in a montage of diverse ecosystems from the Americas to Iceland and New Zealand. Colorful organic textures and forms, inspired by qualities of the natural world, were created through an array of direct-on-film techniques. This abstract imagery is superimposed upon nature cinematography through double-projection, creating depth and merging the powerful intricacies of the natural world with an artist’s reverence for it all. Anxiety and loss are evoked as the camera hurries to “capture” the natural world on film before it vanishes.

A diagnosis of an eye disorder incited this meditation on fear and beauty. Glimpses of curious and creative souls peek out of countless hand-painted film frames. Infinite colors and textures burst, blend and challenge the primacy of uniform vision.

A two-year-old boy revels in all things tiny and huge on and around a farm. His father nurtures his exuberant and insatiable curiosity of new experiences– from climbing a crumbling wall to discovering the natural world. As a father-son bond grows, the mother with camera observes, gets lost into a solitary landscape and returns. The fleeting and glowing visual field evokes the delicate tension between distance and intimacy. Richly toned black and white positive, negative and solarized images, combined with snippets of voice, suggest the texture of memory. Reeves shot, hand-processed, solarized and colored Strawberries in the Summertime in rural Ontario at the “Film Farm” Independent Imaging Retreat run by filmmaker Philip Hoffman.

Solarized, tinted, and optically-printed, this is a surreal portrait of desire, ghosts and pursuit of the sensual. Rhythmic color shifts in the emulsion bring life to the rural landscape, which seems to embody the terrain of the subconscious. Three women seek pleasure and the beyond in parallel universes, which never quite intersect. When one finds another, she is either buried in the sand or asleep under a tree. Made at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, 1997.

Fear of Blushing bursts forth with irrepressible hand-painted color, corroded emulsion and a menacing soundscape of looped voices, distorted instrumentals, samples & rhythm. Fleeting visions and voices erupt out of the ominous abstraction in unusual juxtapositions, suggesting a cinematic free-association marked by anxiety, pleasure and shame. Best appreciated in the immediate; the 7200 painted frames fly by at an average of 12 per second.

Exuberant rhythms are created for the eyes in this nostalgic study of the single film frame, by cutting, pasting, and painting clear and photographed 16mm film frames. Fleeting shapes in lush, spattered color flicker and dance to big band beats.

Passing landscapes, sound transmissions, trips to the seashore and portraits of a grandmother that all strike the viewer as an elusive and intensely lyrical panorama of the past.

Film artist Jennifer Reeves and musician Anthony Burr collaborated to make this live film and music performance, which mixes and subverts symbols of science, industry, medicine and madness. Up to 4 screens and 4 channels of multi-layered music immerse the audience in colorful rhythmic molecular forms, morphing frequencies and visual textures, which are broken down to the particle. Found images from the 20th century educational films are sewn together with melted down pharmaceuticals affixed directly to the film, and form a concentrated fusion with pulsating electronic sounds and an acoustic multi-tonal bass clarinet. Illustrations of brain dendrites, synapses, waveforms and assembly lines personify the movement of frequencies and light as they envelop the audience. As the performance ensues, the intensity builds to a point of irresistible danger and rupture.

Nine visually rhythmic film sketches depict the passions, fetishes and humor of various women characters- from Eve in her garden to an everyday pineapple goddess.

This photogram film of sweets, sustenance and colored light was originally made for a Stan Brakhage memorial screening at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in New York. The title refers to an anecdote my father told me about his childhood- at five years of age, these were the words my father used to tell his own father that men had come and turned off their electricity. My father died of cancer shortly before Brakhage did- making this a film was a gesture for the both of them.

"Much in the way musicians will mine their previous compositions to create ever-evolving works, He Walked Away is a distinct yet nostalgic film. It distills what my eyes have witnessed, captured, and lost in 15 years of artistic growth, my obsessions, discoveries, vanishings and growing pains." - Jennifer Reeves

"A fragmented psychic landscape where TV clips, bar talk, and rape loom close. Trying to reconstruct and resolve sexual abuse becomes a complex project of association and recall. Daydream has a thick, luminous feel." Elisabeth Subrin, Visions Magazine

A bloody adaptation of a William Carlos Williams poem. The film begins with Williams’ question “What are these elations I have at my own underwear?” and Reeves answers with a not so elated, transgressive statement.

Shadows Choose Their Horrors is the dark and melodic diary of a necromancer living on the edge between the mortal world and the realm of lost souls. Sinister forces surround Madame G (Winsome Brown) as she tries to bond with her favorite undead. Using magic and ritual to give them new life and pleasures, Madame G is shocked by the devastating outcome. This camp and experimental reworking of early silent horror was inspired by both the un-staged Aaron Copland ballet Grohg, and the film that stirred the young Copland to write his ballet, Nosferatu.

GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION immerses viewers in the fraught life of a recently divorced 30-year-old mother, the culture and events of her formative years, and the bewildering world of the mid-1960s psychotherapy office. Reeves re-works and subverts the first psychotherapy training film to ever present full, genuine sessions (THREE APPROACHES TO PSYCHOTHERAPY, 1965) through multiple-projection, montage with other found films of the time, and by undoing the linear narrative of the psychotherapy session. Reeves superimposes 16mm home movies from Gloria’s childhood and adolescence, newsreels, a brassiere commercial, a Miss America pageant, and educational films highlight the social conditions of the world and time of Gloria’s 30 years, acknowledged by only one of the therapists. The layered montage brings out the absurdity, humor, anger, and deep revelations that can come from baring one’s secrets to the experts.

Found images from twentieth-century educational films are sewn together with melted-down pharmaceuticals fixed to the film in a concentrated fusion with pulsating music.

The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her Brooklyn apartment on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. Robyn Taylor tries to kick her growing agoraphobia by re-imagining her past and contemplating world events of the present. As Robyn begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with “the amnesia of the American people”.