Review: "Night Reels: The Work of Stacey Steers" at BMoCA

Having opened in late January, “Night Reels: The Work of Stacey Steers” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art went dark when the novel coronavirus shuttered most everything. This week, BMoCA returns from its hiatus with the quietly stunning show of Steers’ silent film trilogy — “Phantom Canyon,” “The Edge of Alchemy” and “Night Hunter” — along with a number of her meticulously wrought collage panels, which comprise those haunting works, and a few other pleasing curisos. It runs through July 26.

Curator Kim Dickey, a noted ceramic artist, has created a space that highlights Steers’ journey as a filmmaker and speaks to the collaborative heft of two thoughtful artists. By turning the gallery, in its own way, into an abode, Dickey buoys Steers’ interest in interiority.

“I just think artist-driven curation is so interesting. Our sensibilities gibe very well,” said Steers, who was sitting near Dickey — but not too near — one recent morning.

If you go

“Night Reels: The Work of Stacey Steers.” Through July 26 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th Street. For information, 303-443-2122. For tickets, bmoca.org.

“From the moment I met Stacey, I felt we were kindred spirits,” Dickey said. “The shared sensibility in the way that she’s interested in the silencing of female voices. In the unexplained, unseen horrors of terror as it exists in domestic condition, terror in terms of the potential ecological collapse and crisis.”

As they talk, sounds from the three movies bleed into each other. It’s atmospheric, not cacophonous; it unnerves and beguiles. The hushed and splendid soundtrack – actually there are three, by Bruce Odland (“Phantom Canyon”), Larry Polansky (“Night Hunter”) and Lech Jankowski (“Edge of Alchemy”) — may prick up your ears, get under your skin and then recede before cresting again in gasps, murmured voices, the tinkling of bells, the dry crackle of insect wings.

Dickey aimed to present the work “in such a way that we also enter the films,” she said. “That we were implicated in the film, that we’ve entered the house. We’re in it but also witness to it.” And there is something satisfyingly immersive in “Night Reels” reliance on sound, and in its use of what might be called props. You’d be on to something in thinking in terms of gallery as mise en scène.

A show that was already impressive has only become more welcome, more potent. During the quarantine, we have had time to consider the centrality of our bodies in social spaces, the power of the tactile, our hunger for screens bigger than our phones, our laptops, or even our overly large, made-for-HD-sporting-events (remember those?) TVs.

The museum’s first-floor space is painted charcoal gray, dark enough for a movie to spellbind but light enough to navigate the hanging artworks and installations. A few panels from “Phantom Canyon” (2006) line the wall. Nearby, a stack of small, black bedframes builds toward the ceiling. On one, a lace-trimmed pillow acts as screen for the 10-minute film about pursuit and escape, coupling and unhitching, punctuated by the flights of bats and moths and the furtive romantic tango of a man and a woman.

Black meshed scrims separate the three makeshift screening spaces. Sculptural elements accompany each film. More than evocative props, they also function as miniature screens on which the movies are projected in how-the-heck-did-they-pull-that-off ways? For “Phantom Canyon,” it’s that pillow. The Frankenstein fable “Edge of Alchemy” — featuring Janet Gaynor and Mary Pickford as the creature-creator, daughter-mother duo — unfolds on a wall but also within a large glass lens housed in a wooden apparatus that resembles an antique scientific device. The quasi-dollhouses of “Night Hunter” (Michael Schliske is the designer and fabricator of these wonders) are particularly intricate: Ah, to peek in the windows and consider inhabitants binge-watching, or more likely trying to escape the spooky, mesmerizing images projected on the walls of their wee and confining rooms.

Viewed together, the trilogy attests to the growth of a director attuned to performance and nimble at leveraging the gifts of her “cast.” For “Phantom Ranch,” Steers found and cutout her male and female characters from antique publications. But Lillian Gish of “Night Hunter” (2011) and “Edge of Alchemy” stars Gaynor and Pickford are among the most revered of the silent era. (Although Gish has been recently censured for her pivotal role in Hollywood’s racist first film, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”).

“I study the telling undercurrents within their performances of femininity,” Steers writes in a recent artist statement. “My films give these women personal agency and empower them as protagonists whose stories unfold in an atmosphere of strange disquiet.” Visually, they conjure the gothic, even as they reference natural worlds of flora and fauna. They hint at shadows more feminine than noir’s hardboiled shades, less steely menace more muted foreboding.

The wonders of “Night Reels” don’t cease in BMoCa’s west gallery but continue on the second floor’s well-lit space where Steers’ handcrafted intricacy is on a different kind of display. (On the way up the stairs, you may get beautifully waylaid by the museum’s Margaretta Gilboy retrospective, with paintings as colorful as “Night Reels” is richly somber. Navigating the museum during this period of social distancing means, among other precautions — masks! — you’ll need to make a reservation for a timed ticket.)

Steers’ rigor as animator and artist — she handmade more than 4000 collages for the 15-minute, 35mm “Night Hunter” — is matched by a tender attention to her materials that honors the domestic sphere of so-called women’s work. There is no aspect of “Night Reels” that isn’t gorgeously wrought.

A long, horizonal vitrine in the middle of the space is filled with masterfully arranged items from the artist’s storehouse: teeny paper cutouts, a moth carcass, graying honeycombs, an antique magnifying glass, source DVDs. And the most amazing of relics: a petrified bat, so perfect you can count his teeth and marvel at the texture of his so perfectly folded wings. All of these make their cameos in the films looping in the floor below.

At the terminus of the show, hangs “Star Chart,” a circular piece that has three encircled mini-screens on which clips of Steers’ latest film, a work in progress involving space play. In addition to an image that uncannily resembles the spiky halo of the coronavirus (it’s not), there’s Gish’s visage.

“In going back to Lillian Gish, I realized that I have a personal relationship to these women, having watched them so intimately,” Steers said. “I also started to think about them a little bit more as women, who they must have been outside of their performances where they were stereotypes, essentially, each one in her way. What I’m drawn to in them is the fact that they do have depth. I appreciate them,” said Steers.

“And I love messing with them.”

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