Five Myles presents Janie Geiser’s projected installation Look and Learn Parts 2, 4, and 5 from May 22 to May 25, 2025. A Reception will be held on Sunday, May 25 from 6-8pm.
In her video installation Look and Learn Parts 2, 4, and 5, Janie Geiser excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct our daily world. “In recent moving image work,” states Geiser, “ I've been obsessed with unearthing possible and impossible narratives from found images. In Look and Learn Parts 2, 4, and 5, I rephotographed a series of found thrift store photos—mainly 1950’s era school class photos – and juxtaposed them with a range of visual instructions (furniture assembly diagrams, how-to manuals, safety instructions, maps), suggesting the sometimes-destructive influence of the adult-created visual structures that frame childhood and the practices of institutional learning.”
These found photographs, which place the students in unforgiving grids, suggest a desire for an orderly world where such instructions might actually be followed. As the three-channel installation progresses, the images move forward in time and become more complex and harder to grasp. The photographs become their own kind of diagrams, forming barely glimpsed guides to the students’ near/future world--- the 1960’s--- when the imagined order of things will, in fact, be exploded.
To suggest the rapidly changing societal movements of the 1960’s, Geiser filmed the school photos, along with photographs of anti-war and civil rights era protests, quickly under the camera. The images become blurred and barely legible. There are glimpses of faces, and a sense of chaos---of rushing forward and backwards, of time out of reach, of change that moves forward and then backwards---then, now, later.
Geiser’s installation at Five Myles consists of three sections:
Look and Learn Part 2 is a 3-channel projection that forms a kind of stroboscopic scroll. The images in each position of the three positions change quickly and at different rates from each other. They are interspersed with moments of flat red video, creating an almost musical visual rhythm.
The soundtrack for Part 2, which can be heard on headphones, is a score of collaged music and found sound, including vinyl recordings from the 1965 Berkeley Teach-In. The sound suggests a possible future for the school students as they emerge from their highly structured world into the California of the Vietnam war and civil-rights era protests.
Look and Learn Part 3 uses the same source material as Part 2, in different ways. Two pico projectors project onto a rotating, 6-sided mirror unit. The video images are reflected from this unit onto the walls of the gallery. Imagery from the two separate projectors merge on the walls at moments, creating brief, superimposed images, before dissolving back into their separateness. The sound, played at a low volume to encourage intimate viewing, was recorded at an elementary school playground near Geiser’s home in Los Angeles.
Look and Learn Part 5 is a single-channel loop of a small figure with a stick, moving up and down as if to hit something or someone. The original object was a small “charm” figure in the shape of a jester of “Punch” figure. Historically, the Punch figure was a kind of trickster character who, through both indirection and violence, tricked the figures of authority. Here, as a shadow figure on a red background, it’s not clear whether he is a trickster for the people, or an authoritarian himself, a dichotomy not unusual in our world.
Watch video documentation excerpts here.
about the artist:
Janie Geiser is an internationally recognized film/performance artist, whose work is known for its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects, its sense of mystery, and its strength of design. ”… Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” (Holly Willis, Res, 2004)
Geiser has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary performance with her innovative live performances that integrate puppetry, objects and projection.
Geiser first began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performances. In 1994, she made her first film that was separate from performance, The Red Book. An instant classic, The Red Book was first screened as part of the 1996 New Directors/New Films series at The Museum of Modern Art and was later selected for inclusion in the Smithsonian's National Film Registry.
Geiser’s films have been screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Berkley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archives, the Centre Pompidou, the Salzberg Museum, San Francisco MOMA, LACMA, Redcat, The Getty, The Academy Museum, Filmforum Los Angeles, and at numerous festivals, including the New York Film Festivals, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, the London International Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Oberhausen, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Janie Geiser’s performances have been presented at The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, CalArts Center for New Performance, LaMama, the Wende Museum, and other venues. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and grants from The Jim Henson Foundation, Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, MAPfund, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the California Community Foundation, and others.
Geiser’s films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library's Donnell Media Center, the Berkley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, and the California Institute of the Arts, and others. The Archive of the Academy of Motion Pictures has selected her body of work for preservation in their archive of experimental films.
Geiser lives in Los Angeles, California, and is on the faculty of CalArts. She is a co-director of Automata, an artist-run non-profit performance gallery in Los Angeles’ Chinatown arts district.
