Look and Learn

2017
Country: USA
Duration: 11 mins
|30 Seconds
Colour,
Sound: Stereo
Ratio: 16:9
Available Format/s: HD Digital file
Original Format: HD Video

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Look and Learn excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct the daily world. Look and Learn explores the juxtaposition of two material image forms: visual instructions (assembly guides, photography manuals, maps, diagrams) and photographs— mainly a set of several 1950’s era elementary school group photographs. The visual instructions mimic maps in their hope of directing us to something, or somewhere, perhaps to a better understanding of our world and how things work.These instructions fight for time with the school photos, which place groups of individual students into unforgiving grids. These photographs suggest a more orderly time when the instructions might actually be followed. The photos themselves become another kind of diagram, forming barely glimpsed guides to the students’ future world. They look ahead, to the 60’s and 70’s, when the imagined order of things will be exploded.Geiser’s sound collage includes found records of film soundtracks, as well as institutional alarms, contemporary field recordings, and short segments of speeches from the 1965 Berkeley Teach-In. Perhaps some of these students found themselves there.In the final section of Look and Learn, the images are harder to grasp, as Geiser moves the photos, along with documentary photographs of anti-war and civil rights era protests, quickly under the camera as she shoots. There is a sense of chaos, of a rushing forward and backwards, of time out of reach, of the impossibility of holding onto change—then, now, later…

More works by Janie Geiser

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