by Holly Willis
Artist’s Statement: These images are from a larger project titled “Film Studies” that transforms a scholarly practice of film analysis into a material practice that takes many forms. In this particular series, I move from writing about cinema, which I’ve done my entire academic life, to dissolving bits of film footage using various liquids, transforming a critique of Hollywood cinema’s oppressive power into a celebration of the beauty in the way the film’s emulsion and the layers of cyan, magenta, and yellow of a film strip dissolve and blur. This practice allows for a kind of joy to emerge within my work and I find the dissolved images strangely, beautifully satisfying.
Holly Willis is a hybrid artist/theorist working primarily in film, video, and still photography. Her work often examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder, alongside critical reflection about our relationship with the matter around us.