Sheri Wills

Director

Sheri Wills is an artist whose work is based in film, video performance, and installation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including one-person shows at the Director’s Lounge in Berlin, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in New York City, and The International Experimental Cinema Exposition. Her films have been screened at venues such as the London Film Festival, the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque, New Mexico), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her collaborations include live video projects with music composed by Jan Jirásek, Charles Norman Mason, Bright Sheng, and Ofer Ben-Amots, and video performances with music ensembles including the NYC choral group Khorikos, the Providence String Quartet, Luna Nova New Music Ensemble, and Ensemble QAT in Montreal. Wills has presented at venues including both Roulette and the Firehouse Space in Brooklyn and the Czech Center in New York City. Her film-based installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums including the Islip Art Museum; Hobusepea Gallery in Tallinn, Estonia; and At Home Gallery in Šamorín, Slovakia. She is a professor in the department of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives in New York City.

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Total Films

Also known as (female)

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Birthday

Zodiac Sign

Genres

Total Films

Also Known As (female)

Place of Birth

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director

19 Works

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Iris

IRIS is a short experimental film that uses found 16mm footage, original tape loops, and vintage recordings to explore attention, suspension, and the slippage between language, music, and aural phantoms – all focused outside of the boundaries of the recommended range. In early cinema the iris shot was used to gradually begin or end a scene and to focus audiences' attention on something of importance in the shot; it mimics the opening and closing iris in the human eye.

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2024

Iris

'Iris' is a short experimental film that uses found 16mm footage, original tape loops, and vintage recordings to explore attention, suspension, and the slippage between language, music, and aural phantoms – all focused outside of the boundaries of the recommended range. In early cinema the iris shot was used to gradually begin or end a scene and to focus audiences' attention on something of importance in the shot; it mimics the opening and closing iris in the human eye.

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2024

SEAM

'SEAM' is a short experimental film shot on Super8 film that explores everyday hauntings, drawing attention to the margins of experience.

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2021

Assembly

Featuring photo collages and drawings by John Schettino, this four-channel piece combines layers of light into a layered panorama—a landscape of glimpsed scenes and inscribed traces. The unfolding imagery is fugitive but insistent and suggests moments that have been lost, erased, or buried, and also suggests the urgency of memory in the face of disappearance. The imagery is constantly in play; as soon as the bigger picture becomes visible it seems to slip away. In the soundtrack, (inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room), the generational decay becomes stronger than the original melody. This piece is as much about what gets lost through re-telling as it is about the ever-lingering echo of past voices that constantly surrounds us in what may sound like white noise.

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2020

The solemn admonition of your breathing

35mm film to digital, color, sound, 2020. Shot with a Lomo-Kino, combined with photograms – the recent past, present, and near future are continuously visible. The title come from: “Today as then I turn to stone in your presence, sea, but no longer feel worthy of the solemn admonition of your breathing” Eugenio Montale, with special thanks to Kirka Kangro.

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2020

Camera Obscura

This short experimental film explores improbable chances, the direction of time, a fragility of feeling, and the nature of the universe—as understood within and outside the confines of the Super 8 film frame. Recorded voices are taken from vintage answering machines from Richman films and Leonard Susskind from “Boltzmann and the Arrow of Time.”

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2019

Abound Box

Shot on Super 8 and combined with photograms, this abstract piece explores the film frame as a box for things that live within the margins of experience. Small moments, soon to be placed on a crowded shelf, impossible to find again. The sound is adapted from recordings from the University of California, Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive

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2015

Scene Box

"Scene Box" explores the landscape in a box: dioramas, view-masters, and scenes from the car window, all contained with the box of the film frame.

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2011

Little Fissures

"Little fissures, small rips, barely noticeable tears- intrude into a subtle meditation on white. A film of in-between spaces, a haiku of small moments." –Sheri Wills

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2010

Aviary

Experimental short by Sheri Wills.

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2006

Riderless

Single-channel video, color, sound, 2004. A reckless meander of words, Riderless explores a few lines from Elm, by Sylvia Plath. Special thanks to Jen Zereski. “Exceptional” Ioannis Mookas, Senses of Cinema, March 2004.

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2004

H'un (Lacerations)

Based on Bright Sheng’s modern orchestral composition of the same name, H’un (Lacerations) finds Wills incorporating representational elements, combined with her signature photograms and abstract images. In Sheng’s 23-minute piece, which is far more extroverted than the sound in Wills’s previous films, she found an opportunity to break out of her typical styles, using everyday objects like a shoe or a cracker to illustrate the film noir-ish score with a touch of humor.

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2003

Acetylene

Experimental short by Sheri Wills.

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2002

Nostos (Nostalgia)

Special thanks to Lia Alexopoulos, Alex Papadopoulos, and Daniel Taylor. “O Caritas” by Cat Stevens.

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Anodyne

Mixing old tech with new, these lyrical abstractions explore red-gold color fields created with photograms (direct exposure of film without cameras), then animated through 16mm rephotography and digital manipulation. Soothing and melancholy, Wills works in the aleatory-painterly tradition of Brakhage, but with sound: the tracks consist of classical music, spoken word, and altered bits of everyday noises. Floral images link her work to Victorian embroidery and other womanly parlor arts. (Ed Halte)

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2001

Effigy

This piece, the very first of my photogram experiments, I made on digital video. Effigy explores the potential of the abstracted film image to stand in for the human body, in a piece that calls to mind medical anxiety and questions the illusion of scale.

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2000

Fever

Experimental short by Sheri Wills.

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2000

Scenes From a Passion

Bogart, Bacall, and more

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1992

Interior Schemes

Yearning for interior design bliss.

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