Leighton Pierce Lecture by Lydia Blackburn

 (a still from Pierce's film Backsteps)

Last Tuesday I saw Leighton Pierce talk at the Alfond auditorium. He showed some of his pieces and gave a good talk. He has worked on 16 mm and also digitally. His images were not particularly ­impressive or memorable for my liking but I was interested in the concepts he was playing with, what he’s thinking about, and how and where he sources his inspiration. The photography was abstract and often played with focus and perspective. He showed films titled Glass, Wood, 50 Feet of String and Backsteps. Leighton talked about being inspired by jazz and electronic music and that music was actually his segue into film. His interest in sound is relevant in his film making process, as in editing he selects shots that have a rich sound potential. Even when he shoots video where sound is captured simultaneously to imagery he will mute the sound so he can give his mind freedom to consider the sound that will create an interesting and dynamic relationship to the visuals. Something he said that stuck with me is “the best thing that can fill space is sound”.

Conceptually, Pierce is interested in the mind-body fusion and exploring the gap between mind and body. He is curious about the idea that one can never just be looking or just be feeling. The two exist in conjunction with, and reactively to, one another. He says that he doesn’t have a specific strategy to separate the two but that this is what he is thinking about and what he is attempting in his filmmaking. He attempts to mess with the way the viewer sees the world. He considers in his shooting what is moving and what is stationary. Why does the ball move and the people do not? For instance. He wants the spectator to question whether what they are seeing is a dream or reality. He spoke about how vision and sounds become a metaphor for reality and that the form is the content. He uses sound to help create this tension and confusion. In his film Backsteps, for example, he uses isolated sounds that fit with the imagery but layers the audio in a different way than we would hear them in “real life”. He talked about being directly inspired by Steve Reich’s song ‘Come Out’ (which he also claimed changed his life) and that he used Reich’s basic form in that song when he was adding audio to Backsteps. In this piece he did some stuttering and layering in which he would play the same sound multiple times but would stutter the sound by playing them offset over each other, each sequential clip being played just a few seconds before the first was triggered to play. He shot the piece in a very abstract and out of focus manner where the viewer can almost just make out the figure of two girls in the darkness. He spoke about abstracting the world through the visual but then in adding the girl’s voices making the world once again real to play with this dream/ reality gray area.