Kelly Sears
Animation, Appropriation, and Abstraction
October 9
Kelly Sears is an experimental animator who reframes American archetypes
and institutions to reimagine our own social and political legacy.
Through combining animated photographic and cinematic documents with
speculative storytelling, each of her films contains recognizable cultural
narratives that take fictional twists, as history merges with the uncanny.
Her award-winning films have screened at Sundance, Slamdance, South by
Southwest, American Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Festival, MoMA, The
Hammer Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Houston, and Union Docs.
Sears has had solo programs of her work at the Pacific Film Archives,
Anthology Film Archives, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Portland
Art Museum, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. She has been awarded
residencies by The MacDowell Artist Colony; Yaddo; Djerassi; The Core
Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Galveston Artist
Residency. Sears is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Moving
Image Arts at the University of Colorado, 麻豆影院, where she teaches
advanced filmmaking, animation, experimental narrative, and media
archeology.
Sears will present short works and discuss her use of visual noise and textures to
disrupt the legible histories embedded in the imagery in her animations. Through
this destabilization, she explores lived experiences and larger political histories in
the everyday imagery around us.