A Double Dose of Texas Filmmakers: Kelly Sears and Karen Skloss

By Mike Fleming

Last week at the 29th Street Ballroom, Houston animator Kelly Sears screened some of her work for the latest installment of Experimental Response Cinema. The room, decorated with Seventies mansion kitsch and lit with an oversized disco ball, was a good match for an animation style that made use of found footage, discarded periodicals, books and archival images.

Sears showed a refreshingly varied selection of works that explored dilemmas like the desire to be connected with one another and the relationship between technology and privacy (Voice on the Line, 2010; The Drift, 2007), as well as what she describes as "the darker side of working out" (The Body Besieged, 2009).

Another piece, Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise (2011), used images harvested from discarded yearbooks to tell a story about a high school in the middle of being consumed by some unknown force. The work, like most of her others, features an interwoven narrative detailing the drama that unfolds. While in some instances, the narration in her work is spoken, this piece features a written narration that allows more room for the ominous audio to augment her images.

When asked by a member of the audience if she would ever consider relying on found material of a more recent vintage, Sears responded that appropriating images from the past is a powerful way to tell something about the present. Plus, she seems to prefer the older film and analog aesthetics. Seeing the masterful way she uses these materials in her work I would say that she shouldn’t change a thing.

After the screening, Black Forest Fire, a local trio of artists with a melancholic pop/drone style, a la My Bloody Valentine and American Analog Set, played a record release show with John Wesley Coleman, III. Fronting the band was Austin filmmaker Karen Skloss, editor of the documentary Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis.

Black Forest Fire's Frenchie Smith-produced debut album, Transit of Venus, so named after a recent astrological event, also features artwork by Storm Thorgerson and Steve Miller of the Steve Miller Band. The cover features a man wearing a black cloak in a forest with streams of water coming in from out of the frame, as mysterious and melancholic as the album itself.

Mike Fleming is an apprentice at the Austin Film Society.