Night Reels

Night Reels: The Work of Stacey Steers

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art

1750 13th Street

Boulder, CO 80302

Guest Curated by Kim Dickey

January 30 – July 26, 2020

Admission: $2 (Reserve your ticket here)

Stacey Steers: Edge of Alchemy

Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

1485 Delgany Street

Denver, CO 80202

Curated by Zoe Larkins

September 20, 2019 to April 5, 2020

Review by Sarah Martin

Stacey Steers is an internationally-recognized filmmaker whose work is currently featured in solo exhibitions at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA). These coinciding exhibitions offer a mid-career survey of Steers’ work that spans collage, film, installation, and sculpture. Steers’ dreamlike aesthetic uses the vernacular of Surrealism to explore ideas of memory, longing, and agency through her female protagonists yet these ideas are often overshadowed by a sole focus on her process.

Stacey Steers was born in Denver in 1954 and is widely known throughout the region for her intricate and labor-intensive films. To create these works, Steers uses images from silent films, historic photographs like those from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion series, and Victorian prints and drawings, transforming them into collages then moving images. Each film features thousands of her individually-cut collages that function as single frames in the stop-motion film-making process. [1]

Stacey Steers, Collages from the film Phantom Canyon (Batwing Man, Woman Twirling), (Batwing Man, Woman, Beetle), 2006. Images courtesy of Robischon Gallery.

While Steers does not cite a direct influence from Surrealism, her work shares deep connections to multiple Surrealist motifs, styles, and specifically Max Ernst’s collage novels such as La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman) from 1929-30. Ernst took images from medical textbooks and illustrated books and reconfigured them into fantastical commentaries on the modern world. Women appear frequently in Ernst’s collages but often as disembodied parts or engulfed in hysteria. Using similar textures and techniques to Ernst, Steers creates collages where women are instead the protagonists with full agency.

Night Reels: The Work of Stacey Steers installation view at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Image by Wes Magyar.

At BMoCA, Night Reels: The Work of Stacey Steers fully immerses the viewer in the colors, sounds, and imagery of Steers’ films. The darkened, main gallery features three screens with the films Phantom Canyon (2006), Night Hunter (2011), and Edge of Alchemy (2017) separated by sheer floral dividers. Curator Kim Dickey chose to focus on the themes of night and highlights the transformative and mysterious elements that run through each of Steers’ films. [2]

Stacey Steers, Phantom Canyon: Stack of Beds, 2016. Top image by Wes Magyar at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Bottom image courtesy of Robischon Gallery.

The artist’s connection to night is especially prevalent in the first piece one encounters in the exhibit, titled Phantom Canyon: Stack of Beds. In this installation, the film Phantom Canyon is projected onto a white pillow on a stack of all black, wooden beds that sit on top of a matching black oversized book. The towering work highlights the relationship between the body and the subconscious of dreams while also bringing the recurring image of the bed out of the film and into the gallery space. It also successfully introduces the viewer to the otherworldly landscapes that Steers creates in all of her films and her transformation of everyday objects from commonplace to surreal.

Night Reels: The Work of Stacey Steers upstairs installation view at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Image by Sarah Martin.

Upstairs the exhibit delves into Steers’ process and features a case of objects from her studio that function as inspiration points for these projects, including books, eggs, and DVDs of silent films. Additional collages from her films are also on view along with her experiments in translating her films into sculptures such as dollhouses and scientific instruments.

In Night Reels, the viewer gains a holistic view of Steers’ career with the inclusion of her installation and sculptural work in addition to all three films in the main room. But Dickey’s decision to focus on the theme of night and the creation of an immersive experience seems to emphasize Steers’ process and aesthetic almost exclusively. While the setting of night is present in each of Steers’ works, Dickey does not address the more driving factors of memory, female agency, and human connections to nature that are at play.

Stacey Steers: Edge of Alchemy installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Image by Wes Magyar.

Concurrently at the MCA, Stacey Steers: Edge of Alchemy centers on the single film and installation work under the same title, Edge of Alchemy. MCA curator Zoe Larkins attempts to move past discussions of process and instead concentrates on the narrative depicted in the film. Edge of Alchemy is a mystical Frankenstein-esque epic that engages with the fear of worldwide beehive and bee colony collapse. Outside of the screening room, the viewer is invited to engage with voyeuristic scientific contraptions and collages that are part of Steers’ process, but the focus of the exhibition is the film itself.

Stacey Steers: Edge of Alchemy screening room at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Image by Wes Magyar.

Edge of Alchemy also explores our relationship to nature through the journey of the female protagonist. Larkins notes that this work subverts much of the misogyny that is projected in Surrealist films such as Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel where the lead female character must escape the violent outburst of a man by hiding behind a chair. [3] Instead, Steers’ characters navigate a realm without men as they seek to foster re-birth while living in harmony with their landscape. 

Stacey Steers, Edge of Alchemy, collage, 2017. Mixed media on paper. Courtesy the artist.

Stacey Steers: Edge of Alchemy collages used for animation, as installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Image by Wes Magyar.

Together, the two exhibitions Night Reels and Edge of Alchemy in fact offer insights into how Stacey Steers’ process has informed and shaped the content of her work. While the labor-intensive methods she uses to create her films are impressive, her images are compelling as standalones and within the narratives of her films where female identity and the surrealism of gender are at the forefront.

Sarah Martin is a Denver-based curator and art historian focusing on spatial theory and phenomenology in contemporary sculpture. She is currently the Curatorial Assistant for the Madden Museum of Art, and holds an MA in Art History with a concentration in Museum Studies from the University of Denver.

[1] According to Robischon’s Trilogy exhibition notes: https://www.artsy.net/show/robischon-gallery-stacey-steers-trilogy.

[2] In Kim Dickey’s essay on Steers available in the gallery at BMoCA.

[3] In Zoe Larkins’ essay on Steers available in the gallery at the MCA Denver.