Sheri Wills
2021
Camera Obscura
Sheri Wills
This short experimental film explores improbable chances, the direction of time, a fragility of feeling, and the nature of the universe—as understood within and outside the confines of the Super 8 film frame. Recorded voices are taken from vintage answering machines from Richman films and Leonard Susskind from “Boltzmann and the Arrow of Time.”
Camera Obscura
Abound Box
Sheri Wills
Shot on Super 8 and combined with photograms, this abstract piece explores the film frame as a box for things that live within the margins of experience. Small moments, soon to be placed on a crowded shelf, impossible to find again. The sound is adapted from recordings from the University of California, Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive
Abound Box
H'un (Lacerations)
Sheri Wills
Based on Bright Sheng’s modern orchestral composition of the same name, H’un (Lacerations) finds Wills incorporating representational elements, combined with her signature photograms and abstract images. In Sheng’s 23-minute piece, which is far more extroverted than the sound in Wills’s previous films, she found an opportunity to break out of her typical styles, using everyday objects like a shoe or a cracker to illustrate the film noir-ish score with a touch of humor.
H'un (Lacerations)
Anodyne
Sheri Wills
Mixing old tech with new, these lyrical abstractions explore red-gold color fields created with photograms (direct exposure of film without cameras), then animated through 16mm rephotography and digital manipulation. Soothing and melancholy, Wills works in the aleatory-painterly tradition of Brakhage, but with sound: the tracks consist of classical music, spoken word, and altered bits of everyday noises. Floral images link her work to Victorian embroidery and other womanly parlor arts. (Ed Halte)
Anodyne
Assembly
Sheri Wills
Featuring photo collages and drawings by John Schettino, this four-channel piece combines layers of light into a layered panorama—a landscape of glimpsed scenes and inscribed traces. The unfolding imagery is fugitive but insistent and suggests moments that have been lost, erased, or buried, and also suggests the urgency of memory in the face of disappearance. The imagery is constantly in play; as soon as the bigger picture becomes visible it seems to slip away. In the soundtrack, (inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room), the generational decay becomes stronger than the original melody. This piece is as much about what gets lost through re-telling as it is about the ever-lingering echo of past voices that constantly surrounds us in what may sound like white noise.
Assembly
