Light Work Mood Disorder

Light Work Mood Disorder

2006 · 26 min · Animation, Documentary

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.

Directed by Jennifer Reeves

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Light Work Mood Disorder

When It Was Blue

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When It Was Blue

When It Was Blue · 2008

When It Was Blue

MovieDocumentary

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.

He Walked Away

He Walked Away · 2006

"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

We Are Going Home

We Are Going Home · 1998

We Are Going Home

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.

Chronic

Chronic · 1997

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.

Color Neutral

Color Neutral · 2014

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.

Darling International

Darling International · 1999

Darling International

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.

Trains Are for Dreaming

Trains Are for Dreaming · 2009

Trains Are for Dreaming

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.

Girls Daydream About Hollywood

Girls Daydream About Hollywood · 1992

Girls Daydream About Hollywood

"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

Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome

Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome · 2022

Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome

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.

The Girl's Nervy.

The Girl's Nervy. · 1995

The Girl's Nervy.

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.

Light Work I

Light Work I · 2007

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.

Landfill 16

Landfill 16 · 2011

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.

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Configuration 20 · 1994

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

Strawberries in the Summertime

Strawberries in the Summertime · 2014

Strawberries in the Summertime

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.

Fear of Blushing

Fear of Blushing · 2001

Fear of Blushing

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.

The Time We Killed

The Time We Killed · 2004

The Time We Killed

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”.

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