Dr. Tess Takahashi will discuss abstraction and embodied modes of mark making in relation to questions of race, gender, and sexuality in artisanal films that draw on the tradition of Brakhage’s work: Emma Hart's Skin Film (UK, 2005-8) and Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience (US, 2015).

Abstraction in experimental film has functioned as a perplexing blank space for critics, who too often want to connect the abstract image to a solid anchor of meaning – like the body of the artist who made it. But when this anchor is a racialized, gendered, or sexually desiring body, it can have the effect of repeating familiar stereotypes. What happens if, instead of reading these films as demonstrations of selfhood, we read them as opening spaces that interrogate this very relationship?