Flutist Tessa Brinckman & percussionist Terry Longshore (Caballito Negro) are excited to perform their original music live for an amazing trilogy of works by film-maker Stacey Steers, a special guest of the Ashland Independent Film Festival in 2018.

Edge of Alchemy | 2017 | 19 min
In this handmade film, composed of over 6,000 collages, the silent-era actors Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor are seamlessly appropriated from their early films of the 1920s and cast into a surreal epic with an upending of the Frankenstein story and an undercurrent of hive collapse.

Night Hunter | 2011 | 16 min
Meticulously crafted from approximately 4,000 handmade collages and incorporating images of Lillian Gish taken from silent-era live-action cinema, Night Hunter summons a disquieting dreamscape drawn from allegory, myth, and archetype to create an evocation of the uncanny and an exploration of the creative process.

Phantom Canyon | 2010 | 10 min
Phantom Canyon is composed of over 4,000 6″ x 8″ collages. these were constructed from Xeroxed elements of 18th and 19th century engravings (primarily Dover clip art) combined with the figures from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion, first published in 1887.

Stacey Steers, designer of the 2018 AIFF film festival poster, 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, experimental narratives. Steers’ animated short films have screened widely throughout the U.S. and abroad, and have received numerous awards.

You can see more of Stacey’s work as part of the media art exhibition:
The Animated Image | April 12—May 12 | Schneider Museum of Art

Also not to be missed on this same concert: The Dying Swan (1916), by Russian film poet Evgeni Bauer, depicting an artist obsessed with the idea of capturing death on canvas, and his fixation on a mute ballerina. The fabulous live score performed by the film’s pianist/composer Joby Talbot, with cellist Michal Palzewicz and violinist Jessica Lambert.