Arbor

Sound collage: Janie Geiser. Sound Mix: Kari Rae Seekins
From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and through the introduction of three dimensional elements, including flowers and thread. The photographs’ subjects are elusive; they rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through their one remembered afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know—and becoming shadows in their own stories.—J.G.

Screening as part of the program Touch and Go

Venue: Francesca Beale Theater