Body Contours
6min, 2015, 16mm film to video using analog video synthesizers, sound, guitar by Charley Pond
Make movies in your mind, feel the soundtrack, and drift away from your body for the win. Produced through a media art residency at Signal Culture using real-time analog video processing tools and found 16mm educational films.
The 16mm media cadavers reanimated for Body Contours include: Body Contours, Man: the Incredible Machine, Fundamentals of the Nervous System, The Cell, and The Spinal Column. Visualization therapy was edited to address the media body’s needs using excerpts from Mental Training for Peak Athletic Performance, VHS.
Excerpt of Body Contours
Screening History:
2023 OPTRONICA1:16MMPOLYVISION with Kristin Reeves and Ivy Woods, two-person expanded cinema program, presented by Other Cinema at ATA, San Francisco, CA
2023 Bodies for Power and Strength media performance by Kristin Reeves, invited solo/feature-length program presented by Cinema Project, at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Willamette University, Portland OR
2023 Bodies for Power and Strength media performance by Kristin Reeves, invited solo/feature-length program presented by Shapeshifters Cinema at Mosswood Chapel, Oakland, CA
2023 Bodies for Power and Strength media performance by Kristin Reeves, invited solo/feature-length program Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
2022 Bodies for Power and Strength media performance by Kristin Reeves, invited solo/feature-length program and festival headliner, The Engauge Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
2022 Bodies for Power and Strength media performance by Kristin Reeves, invited solo/feature-length program, The Centro Cultural de España, (Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico), Mexico City, Mexico.
2021 20th Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Program 5: Kristin Reeves, invited solo/feature-length program, Milwaukee, WI.
2020 Interference Fest: Wxmen Making Noise 2020, international, invited, Austin, TX, online.
2020 NSFW (Animation For Adults), curated by C. Jacqueline Wood, regionally adjudicated, FotoFocus Films at THE LODGE, Dayton, KY
2020 Leap Fest Vertical Cinema, Expanded Cinema by Kristin Reeves, University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA.
2019 Kinesthesia, Deluge Deluge Contemporary Art, BC, Victoria, Canada
2018 Rage/Resist, presented by GAZE, Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco, CA
2018 Cinema Expanded Hopkins Hall Gallery, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
2018 AXW PERSISTENCE, internationally curated by Lili White, BMCC/CUNY, New York, NY
2017 AXW Sightseeing, internationally curated by Lili White, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY
2017 Dallas Medianale, internationally adjudicated, Dallas Contemporary Museum, Dallas, TX
2017 19th Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Harrisburg, PA
2017 AVIFF Cannes Art Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Cannes, France
2017 Mediated: Signal Culture Artists in Residence, Davis Gallery, Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva, NY (curator Christine Chin)
2017 Solo program, invited, Ear & Eye Clinic, The School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL
2016 Thank Your Body for Its Strength and Power, Crossroads, internationally adjudicated, San Francisco, CA
2016 Crossroads 2016 traveling program: Thank Your Body for Its Strength and Power, Cellular Cinema, Minneapolis, MN
2016 Onion City Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Chicago, IL
2016 23rd Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Chicago, IL
2016 Revelation Perth International Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Perth, Australia
2016 Athens International Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Athens, OH
2016 Haverhill Experimental Film/Video Festival, internationally adjudicated, Haverhill, MA
2016 Experiments in Cinema 11.4, internationally adjudicated, Albuquerque, NM
2016 Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Winnipeg, Canada
2016 Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Milwaukee, WI
2016 35th Annual Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, Minneapolis, MN
2016 San Diego Underground Film Festival, internationally adjudicated, San Diego, CA
2016 Indie Grits, regionally adjudicated, Columbia, SC (Helen Hill Memorial Award)
2015 Solo program, internationally adjudicated, Antimatter [Media Art] Festival, Deluge Contemporary Art, BC, Victoria, Canada
2015 Solo, Indiana University South Bend Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts video gallery, South Bend, IN
Statment
Brain signals overload when our bodies are met with physical and mental trauma ranging from a single overwhelming moment, repeated exposure to dehumanizing content, or when we are too young to have developed the mental physiology to process waves needing a more mature anatomy. Meaning, thought, memory, actions, and our means to comprehend rely as sensation. Outside of the reach of language and logic, brains jam and loop without a lyrical narrative end unless the over aroused signal can come to rest through a variety of reprocessing therapies.
While researching the mind/body/signal/sequence phenomenon of trauma, I became an artist-in-residence at Signal Culture. With the aid of their video synthesizers, I was able to model a signal overload of the physical media bodies I have amassed, 16mm educational/medical/hygiene films as well as direct laser animations of looping forms and fractured lyrics. Signal Culture’s Jones Rasterizer inspired the base of my modeling method. I converted the visual image of the filmic body into a controlling signal, which was then applied back onto itself through the Jones Rasterizer. The process resulted in a visual representation of body as signal, a signal which then directs the filmic body’s new reanimated narrative loop.
I have been examining the history and authenticity of photographic media’s ability to represent a human body. Clinical films have been surveying the body, exposing where it hurts, and giving expert instruction on how to best control and understand our uncontrollable selves since motion picture’s invention. Now due to its outdated format, content, and lack of formal beauty, most 16mm educational films are dead rotting media cadavers. Cadavers, both human and filmic, are valuable bodies for research, experimentation, procedural practice, and innovation. Unable to consent to their specific use, the material speaks silently through the physical record of its decay and previous context/use: scratches, cuts, incisions, dissections, transplants, dismemberment, mistakes, and triumphs.
I started digging through medical/educational archives because I had been photographed frequently for pediatric research and was both obsessed with and frightened of finding an image of myself with blacked out eyes. I did not find published photographic evidence of my pediatric history specifically, but I did find images documenting bodies and moments that felt like my own. Medical experts are charged with unpacking what it is to be human and their results are thought to be true. As an artist I am interested in the same questions as well as searching for truth through the use of the media bodies I examine, exhume, and reanimate.