Look and Learn (Parts 1 and 3)

March 23-26 · Knoxville Museum of Art

Drawing on a range of visual instructions, assembly guides, photography manuals, maps, and diagrams, Look and Learn (Parts 1 and 3) excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct the daily material world. These instructions are filmed in tandem with a series of found 1950s school class photos. Each individual student portrait is inserted into an orderly grid, so the overall photo suggests orderly children seated at their classroom desks, ready to learn. Magnified through the camera, the individuals re-assert themselves, and suggest another kind of diagram, a barely glimpsed chaotic guide to their future world.

Part 1: Far wall; two side by side projectors (8-minute video loop)
Part 3: Entryway corner; projector with rotating mirrors (3-minute loop with rotating mirrors)

About Janie Geiser

Janie Geiser’s work “prowls around the mysterious boundary-land between territories–like the lands of the conscious and the unconscious mind, or life and death, sanity and madness, hope and despair, animate and inanimate, nature and culture. From these uncanny in-between zones, her projects send back mysterious intelligence about the roiling nether lands we largely fear to traverse alone. Geiser is a guide to the other side, wherever that ‘other’ might be.”–Holly Willis, KCET Artbound

Named one of the world’s top avant-garde filmmakers on Film Comment’s “Best of the Decade” list, Janie Geiser works in multiple disciplines, including film, installation, visual art, sound, and performance, often working and reworking bits of discarded materials. Janie is on the faculty at CalArts, and her work has been recognized with a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an OBIE Award. Her films have screened at the Whitney, the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Centre Pompidou, Pacific Film Archives, and at major film festivals in New York, Rotterdam, London, Oberhausen, and Hong Kong.