Mike Stoltz

When the edge becomes the center.

"...flattened images are dictated by actions happening outside of the frame. Choreography of bouncy balls and water fountains are involved." (Rick Bahto)

Mike Stoltz pays wistful tribute to his childhood home on Central Florida's "Space Coast," the site of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

An exercise in permeable architecture, an attempt to walk through walls.

“This morning the window blew its glass onto my face. Real morning with pluses and minuses: my symbols for truth.” (Watt)

Fences, zooms, blast beats, and oscillators search for possibility or perforation as walls close in, attempting to break free from patterns and spirals as bodies become contained.

A domestic swirl filmed while the building was being sold. How much longer can we afford to stay? A kaleidoscopic portrait of destabilization during the struggle to stay in a rent-controlled apartment amidst an affordable housing crisis. Shot frame by frame, moving the camera between every image. Single frames move forward in time, creating afterimage combinations without superimpositions. A phased drum machine soundtrack emphasizes the percussive quality of the image. With gratitude to neighbors and the Los Angeles Tenants Union Northeast Local.

“This project began out of a fascination with a giant sculpture of a dragon attached to a Central Florida mansion. The property had recently been left to rot, held in lien by a bank. Hurricanes washed away the sculpture. I learned about the artist who created this landmark, Lewis Vandercar (1913-1988), who began as a painter. His practice grew along with his notoriety for spell-casting and telepathy. Inspired by Vandercar’s interest in parallel possibility, I combined these images with text from local newspaper articles in a haunted-house film that both engages with and looks beyond the material world.”—Mike Stoltz

"A cameraless video that uses digital oscillators and feedback to push out against the edges of the screen."

Stoltz constructed Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View) using footage of passersby he filmed from his art studio in East Hollywood interspersed with still images from an archive of photographic slides he found at a rummage sale at the Echo Park Film Center. These images picture the streets of Los Angeles covered with wheat-pasted movie posters for Underground, a 1976 documentary about the Weather Underground.

A series of video oscillator to 16mm film tests shot one frame at a time in the middle of the night.

An abstracted nightclub performance, its constituent parts—stand-up comedy, a capella, a laconic bass-and-drum rock duo, a slapstick mime—wrenched apart and recombined.