Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive animated films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Her recent work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, lyrical narratives. In these projects she investigates the nature of longing, and explores the ways desire provokes and mediates experience to create meaning.
Steers’ animated short films have screened widely throughout the U.S. and abroad, and have received numerous awards. Her films have been included in the Sundance FF, Telluride FF, New Directors New Films (New York), Rotterdam IFF, and screened at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and MoMA.
Recently Steers has expanded her work to include collaborative installations that join invented, three-dimensional production elements with film loops, creating a new context for experiencing her films.
Steers’ installation work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery, (Washington, D.C.), the Denver Art Museum, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, among other venues and has been collected widely.
Stacey Steers is a recipient of major grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital and the American Film Institute. She was the focus of a major retrospective at the 2015 Annecy Festival of Animation in Annecy, France and received the Brakhage Vision Award at the 2012 Denver IFF. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.
Program
Phantom Canyon
(2006, 10:00, 35mm, B&W, stereo sound)
Phantom Canyon is an exploration of memories and a personal reflection on a pivotal journey taken years ago. The film metaphorically circumnavigates this experience and is a surreal meditation on the filmmaker's own process of interpretation. Music and sound design by Bruce Odland.
Totem (1999 11:00 35mm, color, stereo sound)
Unfolding like a dream might, Totem explores our evolving relationship to the animal world.
Music and sound by Bruce Odland.
Night Hunter (2011, 15:30, 35mm color, stereo sound)
In this meticulously crafted film, the actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. Night Hunter summons a disquieting dreamscape, drawn from allegory, myth and archetype to create an evocation of the uncanny and a reflection on the creative process. Music and sound by Larry Polansky.
Edge of Alchemy (2017, 19:00, 35mm to 4K, stereo sound)
Edge of Alchemy is the third film in a trilogy examining women’s inner worlds. In this handmade film, assembled from over 6,000 collages, the actors Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor are appropriated from their early silent features and cast into a surreal epic with an unending of the Frankenstein story. Music by Lech Jankowski (Brothers Quay). Edge of Alchemy was completed with generous funding from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Creative Capital Foundation.
“Edge of Alchemy is the epitome of Stacey Steers' unique vision of collaged re-examination animations, an uncanny way to carry on in the great tradition of surrealist cinema. Max Ernst would refer to Lautréamont’s sewing machine and umbrella to define the structure of the surrealist painting as 'a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.' I would add, making it all feel so seamlessly inevitable and inexplicably right...the 'feeling of form', as Suzanne K. Langer might have put it…” (Phil Solomon)