Kerry Laitala
2021
Terra Firma
Kerry Laitala
"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.
Terra Firma
Out of the Ether
Kerry Laitala
"OUT OF THE ETHER" IS A HAND CRAFTED 16MM FILM COMPOSED ON THE OPTICAL PRINTER AND TONED TO BRING OUT PULSATING HUES OF OOZING GREENS AND YELLOWS. "OUT OF THE ETHER" POSES THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS: "WHAT DO WE LEAVE BEHIND? ARE INSTITUTIONAL FORCES USING OUR HYSTERIA TO REAP THE BENEFITS OF POSSIBLE INFECTION? WHOSE ENVIRONMENT COULD WE POSSIBLY BE AFFECTING? WHAT UNSEEN FORCES WOULD UNSCRUPULOUS BEINGS WANT TO USE TO INFILTRATE OUR BODIES AND PERHAPS OUR CONSCIOUSNESS? WHO IS THE ENEMY? "OUT OF THE ETHER" UNLEASHES UPON AN UNSUSPECTING AUDIENCE SEPTIC MUSINGS ABOUT FEAR IN THE GUISE OF MICROBIAL MENACE AND MAYHEM.
Out of the Ether
Fire Fly EYE
Kerry Laitala
"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.
Fire Fly EYE
Figments in Film, Number One
Kerry Laitala
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.
Figments in Film, Number One
Muse of Cinema
Kerry Laitala
Muse of Cinema is a rowdy frolic through early moving picture technology and illuminates the atmosphere of the darkened, Victorian era theater. Magic lantern slides spring to life as they directly address the audience, highlighting many problems endemic to this time, and which communicate technical difficulties prevalent in the projection booths of the era.
Muse of Cinema
Retrospectroscope
Kerry Laitala
"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
Retrospectroscope
The City Luminous: Electric Salome
Kerry Laitala
Loie Fuller was a major innovator in fin-de-siècle dance, costuming and theatrical lighting design. Her Serpentine Dances became hugely popular, inspired dozens of imitators, and are best known today through the early films shot by the likes of W.K.L. Dickson, Alice Guy Blache, Segundo de Chomon, Georges Melies and others. Towards the end of her career Fuller brought her troupe to San Francisco’s PPIE, where they performed under the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts as a fundraiser to allow it to become the only major structure to be saved from destruction at the end of the fair. Laitala filmed San Francisco dancer Jenny Stulberg in the act of resurrecting Fuller’s fluttering aura through her own choreographed interpretations. Then she reproduced Stulberg’s image onto separate film strips which will rejoin together projected onto a phantom presence that brings a sculptural element into the proceedings. Voicehandler provides the sound.
The City Luminous: Electric Salome
Awake, But Dreaming
Kerry Laitala
"This completely hand processed 16mm film was shot in the Hirschgang Oberer, an extended arched hallway at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where I was in residence intermittently from 1998-2001. Awake, but Dreaming recreates a sense of an endless cyclical dreamscape that is conjured up from the deep recesses of the imagination. The images are coupled with a mysterious soundtrack producing uncanny associations: the flapping of wings, shrill cries of birds, a revolver fired off following unseen footsteps. A disembodied hovering presence evokes a menace that is intimated through the sonorous resonance, but never manifests itself. The dreamer never reaches the apex of consciousness, only lingers repeatedly in the periphery of alchemically enhanced light and shadow."
Awake, But Dreaming
The City Luminous: Spectacle of Light
Kerry Laitala
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.
The City Luminous: Spectacle of Light
