Kelly Sears In Person
Presented in association with the Department of Film & Media, UC Berkeley
Admission: $10 general/$5 Cinematheque members
Advance tickets available here
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Witty, savvy, ironic, poetic, exhilarating, even cosmic...Sears’ works afford the viewer a sort of wormhole into a parallel universe… made entirely of things we nonetheless recognize. This is the uncanny principle that Ms. Sears so unerringly parlays, rendering collage-animation singularities out of institutional media. Something is wrong with these pictures, things are not what they seem, appearances are mere cover-ups for the real power plays behind the panels. (Craig Baldwin: “Archive in the Sky”)

 Toiling consistently over the past decade-and-a-half, stealthily infiltrating our nation’s vast ideological image banks, Kelly Sears has created a remarkable dossier of animated digital video documents chronicling the American gothic substratum with paranoid aplomb. With an anti-nostalgic attitude toward repurposed mid-century kitsch, Sears’ sinister sub-narratives pick at the psychological traumas embodied in our nation’s institutions and peer behind the official veils of national self-image. In the process, American ambitions turn nightmarish, revealing deep malaise within the collective unconscious; always there, always hidden in plain view. Tonight’s screening represents a 2008–2015 mini-retrospective of Sears’ digital-video collage animations including: Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise, described by Art Lies as “a mix between Carrie and Charles Burns’ Black Hole”; The Drift, an unsettling astronaut saga; He Hates to Be Second and The Body Besieged, paired films on masculine and feminine imperatives; Cold War surveillance studies Voice on the Line and Cover Me Alpha; storm-watcher psychodramas Tropical Depression and Jupiter Elicius; and Sears’ most recent film, Pattern for Survival. (Steve Polta)

image above: Kelly Sears: Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise (2011)