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.

마일스 데이비스의 유일한 제자 월리스 로니. 그는 마일스 데이비스의 미완성 걸작인 ‘유니버스(Universe)’를 완성하기 위한 여정을 시작한다. 그리고 ‘유니버스’는 월리스가 세상을 떠나기 전 남긴 마지막 작품이 된다.

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.