In this conversation, we discuss The Drift, Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise, and Pattern for Survival.
Kelly Sears uses experimental animation techniques to create hybrid works that draw on fiction and documentary storytelling, recasting American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our own social and political legacies.
She transforms an extensive trove of source materials, such as first aid handbooks, chronicles of space exploration, presidential and military newsreels, 35 millimeter photography manuals, aerobic and yoga guides, archival films, high school yearbooks, and disaster survival guidebooks, into new instructional and advisory texts that may lead the viewer astray and disoriented. Through these animations, we glean bits of history that are recognizable but unsteady.