Biography
Charlotte Pryce has been making films and optical objects since 1986 and her works have screened throughout the world. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England), and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). She is a graduate of the Slade School of Art, University College London (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA). In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglass Edwards Award for best experimental cinema achievement. In 2019, she was honored with career retrospectives at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Bozar (Brussels), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periferico.
ILLUSORY OBJECTS AND KINETIC WONDER
Charlotte Pryce explores proto-cinematic structures of reverie: juxtaposing the real and the imagined to create deeply saturated, fleeting illuminations that hover on the periphery of vision. Her work is infused with an optical and photochemical consciousness that delights in catoptric playfulness and paradox.
Read Jordan Cronk's interview with Charlotte Pryce in ARTFORUM
COMMENTS
"What Pryce creates is something personal, miniature, like something you can hold in your hands. It's like nothing I've ever seen in my life, and I'd wager that the entire audience around me felt the same way. Pryce's exploration in magic lantern projections as well as in 16mm--gorgeous, flickering immersions in nature, sometimes in books, the kind that your eyes can barely believe you're seeing--seem to come from another world, yet are grounded in the earth. Her art comes at a time when we're all wondering where cinema is headed. She is looking back and forth, and forward at the same time.
Just as 19th-century magic lanterns presaged the cinema to follow, so Pryce's 21st-century work presages a new, alternative view of a post-cinema cinema. She is unique."
-- Robert Koehler (critic/curator)
-- Robert Koehler (critic/curator)
"These brief illuminations do more than simply bring us closer to the natural world; they invite us to experience the world differently... they invite us into a space of reflection and re-imagining, uprooting fixities and challenging traditional ways of seeing."
-- Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices
-- Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices
"It's in the nature of a vision to be both concrete yet inexplicable: in Victorian fashion, Pryce, echoing the intimation of a divine spirit in Emily Dickinson's poems, imbues her reveries with a sense of otherworldliness."
-- Ela Bittencourt, Frieze.com.
-- Ela Bittencourt, Frieze.com.
"Looking at her work is wandering through the Wunderkammer of cinema."
-- Dana Linssen, NRC (Netherlands)
-- Dana Linssen, NRC (Netherlands)
"Brief glimpses of nature assembled into a beautiful, rhythmic montage of illusions that vanish like a dream"
-- Doug Cummings, LA Weekly
-- Doug Cummings, LA Weekly
"Like a modern Muybridge, Pryce conveys the mystery of flight. She denies the explicit statement while invoking a world of complete surprise."
-- Joke de Wolf, De Groene Rotterdammer
-- Joke de Wolf, De Groene Rotterdammer
In Swedish only:
-- Martin Grennberger, Walden
-- Martin Grennberger, Walden
"Charlotte Pryce visualizes a cosmic eye in matter, and the invisible that permeates us. Inspired by the visionary experience, this is the greatness of Pwdre Ser: the Rot of Stars. It evokes the sense of coming from this dimension."
-- Francesco Cazzin, L'EMERGERE DEL POSSIBILE: Il cinema futuro e l'immortalita
-- Francesco Cazzin, L'EMERGERE DEL POSSIBILE: Il cinema futuro e l'immortalita
"With a form and significance that flow defiantly between exposure and concealment, her films suggest a rich gulf between what exists to be seen and that which can only be witnessed when mediated through fantasy. Pryce plumbs the origins of illusion to discover the world anew, and in so doing traces the genesis of new forms of making and seeing.... As the distinctions between new and old material become blurred, Pryce's discoveries become downright miraculous.... [Her] position in offering a radically subjective view of the natural world pushes the boundaries of human and photomechanical perception--bringing her visions into existence, offering up hints as to their meaning, and then allowing them to come apart and dissolve silently out of sight."
-- Samuel La France (film programmer/historian), The Latent Image: On Charlotte Pryce's Film Art
-- Samuel La France (film programmer/historian), The Latent Image: On Charlotte Pryce's Film Art
"Visually impressive and narratively beguiling, [Pryce's] Magic Lantern' performances were transportive experiences... presenting nature as she does, as a thing of utter beauty, but also as a thing that has a sadness of its own. In the films, this mournful is more hidden, fleeting, masked with wonder.... It is hard not to get swept up in it, to feel like nature, as Pryce envisions it, is something strange and special; not just something worth paying closer attention to, but something actively worth saving."
-- Matt Turner, reviewing Charlotte Pryce Career Retrospective at Rotterdam International Film Festival, in: Another Gaze
-- Matt Turner, reviewing Charlotte Pryce Career Retrospective at Rotterdam International Film Festival, in: Another Gaze
"Charlotte Pryce's body of work offers the beautiful possibilities of film as miniature, wherein brief filmic glimpses offer depths of suggestion and inquiry."
-- Chris Kennedy / Vanessa O'Neill (filmmaker/curators)
-- Chris Kennedy / Vanessa O'Neill (filmmaker/curators)