Artist in person - Q&A following the screening
In person & live-streamed
Microscope is very pleased to present a solo screening of works in 16mm and video by Sasha Waters Freyer, including the New York premiere of her new short video “Ashes of Roses" (2023). Waters will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening, which will take place both in-person and online.
The program includes a selection of 8 films and videos made by the artist over the past 20 years. Waters’ films, despite how far apart their themes and subjects may appear to be, act as mirrors of her personal, interior life: at times, they convey a feeling, an emotion, or a mood, and in others frustrations or contemplations.
In her works, Waters weaves together lush film shots with educational, scientific or military found footage so seamlessly that is difficult to discern between original and archival sequences. The ease with which she transitions between personal and appropriated, as well as between voiceover and inter-titling, belies her multifaceted investigations of both the documentary and the experimental filmmaking genres. Each image is saturated with emotion, reflection, and the consciousness that every image is someone’s image, that behind each of them is a person who created or selected each frame, in this sense moving beyond the duality of appropriated vs. original footage.
In two of Waters’ most recent and autobiographical works — Ashes of Roses (2023), which deals with “the adolescent desire and the outrageous yet mundane humiliations of being a teenage girl in the 1980s,” and Fragile (2022), a work on “the early history of cinema, the anxiety of aging, and the woeful comedy of professional envy” — a sense of self-awareness and vulnerability leads to ironical conclusions related to the filmmaker now being a "Mid-Atlantic hockey mom."
Sentiments related to the shifting stages of life — such as the internal debates that arise from looking back at our past, while recalculating as we move forward — pervade the works. Juxtapositions of brief film sequences set to music often seem to represent an almost last attempt at grasping what hides within those moments of life. In “Burn Out the Day” (2014), watching an abandoned house as it burns to the ground appears to be an eerie form of entertainment for local residents of a small town, with the fire becoming a blazing sign of the change that is to come.
Waters will be available for a Q&A following the screening.
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A moving image artist trained in photography and the documentary tradition, Sasha Waters Freyer’s work is concerned with devotional practice – explored in her personal, feminist experimental films that carefully observe domestic and maternal spaces – and in portraits of artists and other humans in restless and hot pursuit of wild ideas, private obsessions and impossible dreams. Sasha’s films have been exhibited at Kassel Dokfest, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Vox Populi, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image; Union Docs, the Library of Congress, the Speed Art Museum and the Gene Siskel Film Center, among other international venues. Selected festival screenings include IMAGES in Toronto, the Telluride Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary, Vancouver International, and Palm Springs Film Festivals. She was the winner of a Special Jury Prize in Documentary at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival.