• A Tone Halfway Between Lightness and Darkness

  • Applied Pressure

  • Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise

  • Pattern for Survival



Afterimage: Collage Animations by Kelly Sears



In Conversation

  • Kelly Sears
  • Rick Prelinger

    Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker, and professor at UC Santa Cruz.

Kelly Sears creates her moody, eerie animations by cutting up and collaging materials ranging from first aid handbooks and high school yearbooks to military newsreels and exercise tapes. Turning the original content on edge through juxtaposition and written texts, voiceovers, and soundscapes, Sears’s animations plumb the dark, anxious underside of our times, drawing on the logic of conspiracy theories, fever dreams, and poetry, drifting between fiction and history. Sears says, “I like working with things that are outdated or cast off as a way of reinvigorating the material and making it resonate in today’s cultural climate.” The result is, in Craig Baldwin’s words, “witty, savvy, ironic, poetic, exhilarating, even cosmic.”

Films in this Screening

A Tone Halfway Between Lightness and Darkness

Kelly Sears, United States, 2015

FILM DETAILS 
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  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 8 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

In the Vicinity

Kelly Sears, United States, 2016

FILM DETAILS 
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  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 7 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

The Drift

Kelly Sears, United States, 2007

FILM DETAILS 
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  • Color
  • Digital
  • 9 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

Tropical Depression

Kelly Sears, United States, 2012

FILM DETAILS 
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  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 3 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

Voice on the Line

Kelly Sears, United States, 2009

FILM DETAILS 
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  • Color
  • Digital file
  • 7 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

Applied Pressure

Kelly Sears, United States, 2018

FILM DETAILS 
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  • Tinted
  • Digital
  • 6 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

The Rancher

Kelly Sears, United States, 2012

FILM DETAILS 
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  • B&W/Color
  • Digital
  • 7 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

The Body Besieged

Kelly Sears, United States, 2009

FILM DETAILS 
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  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 5 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise

Kelly Sears, United States, 2011

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W/Color
  • Digital
  • 8 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears

Pattern for Survival

Kelly Sears, United States, 2015

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • Digital
  • 7 mins
source
  • Kelly Sears