Janie Geiser is an LA-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and art.
Hearing from Janie was a really intriguing experience. While I admit I wasn’t as taken with the puppetry side of her work, I was drawn to her films, their layered collages and dreamlike imagery.
My favorite of the films she showed us was "The Red Book". The film is about a woman's loss of memory on language itself. Words disappear as they are written, and reading the news seems like an alien language to her. Janie's use of montage and stop motion techniques brings the audience into the mind and perspective of the woman in the film. We got to hear the backstory of this piece, and I'm glad she did not get the rights to the original story, which allowed her to change the main character to a woman, whom she felt much more connected to, and allowed her to add her own emotions to the film. This gave the film power.
I noticed one of the common themes in the films she showed us was the depiction of hands. It seemed important to her that close-ups of hands had to be included. However, I was surprised that she claimed she did not notice this motif until now.
I really resonated with how she described her creative process. Instead of building a film in strict order, she works on small fragments and individual images, almost like improvising with found footage and imagery, then threading the individual parts together later. This way of working is similar to how I approach my own projects. I also like to develop pieces out of order following my intuition, and letting ideas connect as they evolve. Seeing how she embraces this method made me feel more confident in my own process.