“When it was Blue” was made with a 16 mm superimposed dual-projection. Reeves herself wrote about it: “The film rejoices the splendor of nature as the camera eye traverses land and sea in a montage of diverse ecosystems from the Americas to Iceland and New Zealand. Colorful organic textures and forms, inspired by qualities of the natural world, were created through an array of direct-on-film techniques. This abstract imagery is superimposed upon nature cinematography through double-projection, creating depth and merging the powerful intricacies of the natural world with an artist’s reverence for it all. Anxiety and loss are evoked as the camera hurries to “capture” the natural world on film before it vanishes.”

Films:

When it was Blue (2008) 58’
Girls Daydream about Hollywood (1992) 4’ (see image 2)
Configuration 20 (1994) 11’
The Girl’s Nervy (1995) 5’
We are going Home (1998) 10’
Fear of Blushing (2001) 5’ (see image 3)
Landfill 16 (2011) 9’
Strawberries in the Summertime (2013) 16’
Color Neutral (2014) 3’
Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome (2022) 6’

“No doubt the fragile stuff of film, made newly strange in an age of immaterial electronic images, encourages the contemplation of change and chance, birth and death; such notions are registered through utterly physical means by Reeves in the fractal cracks of distressed pigment that adorn some of her hand-edited frames, or the tidal flows of thick, opalescent paint, sometimes dotted with stellar bubbles of captured air, that wash across other moments.”
— Ed Halter, Artforum

“Structurally, Reeves has held a daring position pushing the limit between sanity, obsessional memories, private madness and societal follies; at the intersection between psychological disorders, cultural artifacts and the process of obscuring/enlarging one’s vision and consciousness by accumulating layers of images on one strip of film.”
— Bérénice Reynaud, Senses of Cinema

Total runtime: 127 min
Language: English / Subtitles: French
Region: Multizone
Includes a 40-page booklet in English & French with texts by Michael Sicinski and Laura Staab