Sara Sowell

Dada’s Daughter is an expanded cinema performance comprising 16mm projections, cinema-objects and a live score. The performance is introduced with hand-developed black and white 16mm photograms made from the imprints of microplastic stars, tacks, jewelry and industrial scrap metal. This process of exposing objects onto celluloid is drawn from Man Ray’s “rayographs,” produced as early as 1923. Spliced in between these images are sections of clear film leader that cue a live performance re-animating the cinema-objects used to create the photograms. When placed in front of the projector these objects create tactile optical images; impressions of form, shape and pattern that reenact the photogramming process. The presence of the photogram reel and performative qualities of this work highlight the tension between ontological concepts of cinema—the material and the ephemeral.

Conjuring Freud's id while watching "America's Next Top Model." Black and white 16mm digital transfer hand-processed in Milwaukee WI.

"Rhythm as a Girl" is an experimental essay film that challenges notions of hierarchy within visual, bodily, and spiritual systems used by painters Hilma af Klint and Mark Rothko. af Klint's notes guide us through the 20th century and the artist's burgeoning understanding of perception and sensations.

In 1966 a landmark suite of orchestral jazz entitled “The Universe Compositions" was written for Miles Davis and set to be recorded by The Miles Davis Quintet. That moment would never happen. The quintet broke up and the compositions were lost for 50 years...until they were finally recovered by Miles’ only protégé, Wallace Roney--the one man Miles would trust to fulfill his wish. As Wallace prepares to record and debut "Universe," he must find a way to uphold his mentor's legacy. The work would take on an added poignancy when Wallace unexpectedly passes in March 2020 before seeing the music's release out in the world.

A meditation on how women traverse their own bodies, through pregnancy and the desire to be pregnant. In documenting corporeal passivity and gestures of desire, questions arise—at what stages do we recognize pregnancy and how do women’s bodies come to matter?

Sam, newly a mother, shops at a supermarket with her baby and husband Carlson. She throws a neighborhood shishkabob party in her den. Her family shares a Sunday breakfast. But through her smiles and picturesque tasks, there's a suppression. Sam’s grown something she can no longer contain. As she purges this parasite, we move inside her body and experience this wildness as a feverish dance.The parasite ejects us back into the kitchen of another woman, alone eating breakfast as she looks at a happy couple pictured on the back of her cereal box. It’s Sam and Carlson. What's beneath a picture? A dream within a dream. Horror meets dance, SWALLOWED suggests a complex truth to motherhood and domesticity. (The Criterion Channel)

Spectrum Spread is an experiment in graphic relationships, superimposing 1940’s Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr in Ziegfeld Girl with footage of atomic bomb films produced in the southwest by the U.S. government.