OPENS SEPTEMBER 20 – Denver Art Museum
This fall, MCA Denver presents Stacey Steers’ animated film Edge of Alchemy (2017). This is the most recent film in Steers’ trilogy that also includes Phantom Canyon (2006) and Night Hunter (2011). Edge of Alchemy depicts silent film-era stars Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor as magicians of sorts—fairy alchemists—working in a laboratory to produce life. Here, Pickford and Gaynor are heroines of a different sort than the ingénues they played in early-twentieth century films. Collaging together imagery of Victorian scientific instruments, plants, and insects, Steers creates a surreal landscape. The result is a science fiction that is at once nostalgic and timeless. The exhibition will also feature individual collages—each one an eighth of a second of the film. Pseudo-scientific viewing apparatuses, each of which shows a clip from the film, will complete the exhibition. Stacey Steers is one of Colorado’s most accomplished filmmakers and artists, and the recipient of grants from the American Film Institute, Creative Capital, and Guggenheim Foundation. In 2012, she received the Denver International Film Festival’s Brakhage Vision Award. Her films have been shown at the Sundance, Telluride, New Directors New Films, Locarno, and Rotterdam film festivals and exhibited at museums around the world, including the Corcoran Gallery, Denver Art Museum, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.