Production format: digital video

Music composed by Laura Steenburge
Sound design: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins

"The starting point for Valeria Street was a box of 7 slides that had fallen from a shelf in my studio. The slides depict a group of men, posed around a table, looking at a set of documents. They are in a generic office setting, with the blinds closed. Each slideis a different framing of the same event---clearly staged for the camera. In the center, seated, is one man. He holds a pen in his left hand. When I looked at the images, magnified through the camera lens, I saw that this was my father.

In recent films, I've been obsessed with unearthing possible and impossible narratives from photographs of strangers. Not knowing their histories, I'm able to imagine / construct new histories, while attempting to unearth something essential about these photographic documents. I was intrigured and somewhat frightened by the idea of working with these photographs of my father. The images suggest something about work and family, and how much of a life is lived outside of each other's eyes."----Janie Geiser

Valeria Street was shown as part of 2018 PROJECTIONS at the NY Film Festival

"In Valeria Street the figure of the father emerges directly. Geiser uses a photograph of him and his colleagues, standing around a conference table, as a starting point. Geometric shapes, graphs and numbers float before us in combinations that at times recall the beautifully proportionate cerebral works of Sol Lewitt. Yet Valeria Street, like Geiser's other films, is also sensual and hallucinatory. The shapes pulse, they emerge, overlap, and the factual, solid world of the photograph is placed side by side the more illusive forms, or subject to direct intervention. In this sense, the film echoes Geiser's persistent preoccupation with the indexical value of photography and film, her examination of just what in an image is truly fixed, what in its cultural context can be taken as a given, and what is occult, impregnable.

In Valeria Street the American industry, its efficiency and promise, encapsulated as the "American way of life," emerges as a mirage. The melancholy of such a transformation, the visual degradation or alternation of the image, its shadowing, or haunting, is heightened by the repetition of the father figure-the face, the amplified male hands, a displacement and disfiguration of the sturdy, authorial body. The partly mournful configuration is offset by the sheer playfulness and multiplicity of the compositions."
- Ela Bittencourt , in her Lyssaria review "Janie Geiser and Ericka Beckman in Projections", 2018

"Like a dream, or a fever, Geiser's work deals with the unfathomable, with the ungraspable, a universe that has a particular meaning inside her mind, something that we deal to discover... There's so much to unveil in Geiser's images, her complex language is like a vast manual of instructions of the unconscious, playful images with a particular voice, layers and layers of different dialogues."

--- José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Desistfilm