Eye of the Maelstrom

Out of the Ether re-assembles disquieting images from decades-old hygiene and science films, merging them with the filmmaker’s own Bolex camerawork. It was re-photographed on the optical printer, toned and tinted to bring out pulsating hues of oozing greens and yellows.

A collection of short experimental horror films, some well-known, some not.

Shot in the filmaker's studio, frantic colored lights permeate the atmosphere. Vibrating swathes of color penetrate the darkness; searchlight spectrums of suspended crystalline forms inspired by the like of Wolfgang Von Goethe, Itten, Belson, Fischinger and Len Lye.

"Kerry Laitala's love of the movie process gives rise to richly crafted and oddly unclassifiable imagery. Re-inventing an antique movie technology using a revolving glass disc, projected lighy and a sequence of early black and white images, and merging it with the later technology of 16mm film, RETROSPECTROSCOPE pulls the moving image backward into a sense of wonder that is both nostalgic and strangely new. –Scott Stark

Hallowed portrays a mystical voyage made back in time by an unconscious woman in the throes of a cataleptic state. She finds herself in Plato's cave where flickering flames incite a prehistoric cinematic reverie evoking an experience of magical proportions.

"Terra Firma" uses 35mm film material that I had laboriously* mastered from a 1908 nitrate print of a " Trip Down Market Street", incorporated with other found images of San Francisco’s built environment before the 1906 disaster. Other images have been gathered from archival photographic materials from numerous vantage points depicting the built space of early San Francisco. Some images that have been re-worked are panoramic in scope, and comprised of pans of large format still images taken by Edweard Muybridge in 1878.

Creation and destruction. Grandiosity and hubris. Glory and The Abyss. These are some of the themes explored in Figments in Film, Number One, which features images from the PPIE while the buildings were in the process of being destroyed. Viewers will be draped in a cloak of decay, rebirth and contemplation. Images were hand-processed, toned and tinted.

"Secure the Shadow" is a meditation on disintegration and morality. The film utilizes antique Medical stereoscopic images from the Victorian era, which are simultaneously disturbing and beautiful.

“Motion/color/light studies shot in my studio” — Kerry Laitala ”The vibrant, abstract spirals of Kerry Laitala’s experiments with chromavision leap off the screen in pulsating 3-D.” — Kathy Geritz and Irina Leimbacher

The inherent violence that is intimated at in this handprocessed film, can only offer a clue of past interventions.

Educational film material is hand-processed, manipulated, and recontextualized by the voices of women at the newest U.S. Supreme Court Justice's confirmation hearing.

Digital video in Chromadepth 3D. "The bubbly dayglo images and bleepy beats added a nice sacriligous feeling, since experimental film shows often feel like going to church." -David Cairns

"Fire Fly EYE" is my response to the devastating re-making of the world brought on by anthropogenic climate change and corporate "stewardship" of our natural resources. A ritual of reclamation in the face of overwhelming destruction, invoked through filming discarded consumer products, sifting spectacle out of catastrophe. -K.L.

Film/video hybrid in Chromadepth 3D.

In 1915 Walter D'Arcy Ryan induced explosions of color over the night sky as part of the Pan-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), a presentation the likes of which had never been seen prior, and which became the model for light displays at future World's Fairs and illumination showcases. One hundred years later, Kerry Laitala pays tribute to this historical moment with a dual-projector performance involving archival images of silhouetted spectators of the 1939 New York World’s Fair sharing screen space with sinuous light shapes swirling, twinkling and bouncing across the frame like unbound forces of energy. The City Luminous: Spectacle of Light will be accompanied by a live soundtrack by Voicehandler (Jacob Felix Heule and Danishta Rivero), who manipulate sounds from various sources including a mechanical music box from Switzerland.

Follow the adventures of the Chroma-Cat as she moves through spectrum-splitting terrain on a quest for answers to the cosmic questions. Might her transmigration be a metaphor for media re-appropriation?