Genres: experimental

  • Letters From Vancouver

    Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.

  • They Looked at Me and I Smiled

    Artists who use their bodies as their medium or canvas while existing in their natural environments. Are they performing? Do their performances end after the makeup is removed? Can a performance continue in an empty apartment instead of in front of an audience?

  • Forties 87

    A video reading of Jackson Mac Low’s “Forties 87, A Stable Person,” made for Counterpath Press in Denver.

  • What’s Ours and What We Are

    In “What’s Ours and What We Are,” images, motifs and words that originally served a particular political agenda are playfully manipulated to distort and re-contextualize their original status, satirically articulating the purpose of propaganda which is to ‘speak to’ and ultimately to persuade a spectator.

  • Hear Me

    A formal collage of various song bites that expresses feelings of anxiety and depression. Uses music and lyrics to describe struggles with mental health / finding hope. I collected lyrics for a couple months that I connected with and helped me understand and describe my struggles with mental health. Then I stitched them together in a poem of sorts. The poem as well as the imagery are jumpy and mimic what goes on in a spiral or panic attack (at least for me) as I move through a dark space and back toward light.

  • Futuro, un film griego-argentino

    What comes from the high seas to the shores of the Atlantic, Pacific or Mediterranean could be plastic, radioactivity… or remains. One night, a woman became stranded in the Mediterranean. The statement she made can not be translated.

  • The Ritual of the Sex Magick Warriors

    The Sex Magick Warriors are organizing, they reveal themselves to the city and risk it all to carry out an obscure objective. The colors pink and teal are the embodiment of Magick, Art and Sexuality and their use by the warriors -through empathy, telepathy and tactile care- spills the tea on their means for survival in these harsh urban environments. The ritual exposes the hardships of this army of lovers and reveals their sensual strategy for self preservation.

  • The Quoddy Fold

    “The Quoddy Fold” is an intimate interaction between a woman and a derelict coastal house. In this one-hour film Phillips dismantles and studies the movement from wood to dust, damp paper to mold, and ponders the house folding back into the land and sea. Phillips’ performance constantly seeks evidence of dissolving boundaries, thingness, history and intersubjectivity of space, place and species. Through the poetics of the ruin “The Quoddy Fold” is an interrogation of dwelling and landscape giving space to entertain the ecological, cultural and societal anxieties surrounding impermanence.

  • Contents

    An old wallet, abandoned intact, kept for unknown reasons. Uncorroborated memories of a close (but distant) relation. How are these documents speaking to each other? What is the nature of their harmony? Official versus living memory: each useless, unstable, disintegrating. Is memory the bureaucracy of the self? How does it order our lives?

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”