Lewis Klahr

"L. Ron Hubbard employed "engram"--a biological coinage meaning the permanent change wrought by stimulus to protoplasm--to characterize repressed traumas. In a different sense, Carl Jung used the word to describe imprinted "racial" memories. Collage filmmaker Lewis Klahr, who calls his latest cycle Engram Sepals, is an artist who traffics in both pyschic scars and cultural remembrance, conditions he suggests are organic by attaching engram to a botanical term for flower stem." -- J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

"Above all, Klahr's great subject is time, which certainly explains the exquisitely melancholy tone that pervades his work. He traffics in modes that are pitched just beyond the realm of reason. Somewhere between waking and sleeping, we can find that wavelength and achieve understanding-- only to have it slip away as we enter one state or the other. Klahr's films and videos provide a rare opportunity for us to engage with a liminal state of consciousness with our alert mind and to reach those "infrathin" moments that Proust describes as existing outside of time." -- Chris Stults, Assistant Curator Film/Video Wexner Center for the Arts, from "Collective Unconscious," an article in Film Comment, May/June 2010

"Lewis Klahr is one of the most original and prolific film artists of his generation. Intensively archeological in his approach to autobiography and cultural ephemera .... J. Hoberman has called Klahr "the reiging proponent of cut and paste" one reason the casual viewer might find surface resemblance to the work of experimental animators like Harry Smith,Stan Vanderbeek and Larry Jordan. But Klahr more appropriately belongs to the lineage of filmmakers like Anger,Kuchar, Warhol and Cornell. Artists who also had a profound understanding and affinity with Classical Hollywood while forging permanent departures through radical form. And like Jacques Tourneur, Klahr is a creator of atmospheres, not mere evocations of mood and setting but ontological terrains where event and emotion register with archetypical power and dreamlike intensity." -- Mark McElhatten, Curator

"The work of Lewis Klahr unfolds between collages, cut-outs, an emotionally overwhelming musical choice and thematic consistency that resembles a pandora's box. Each new film or episode of a longer series cause an inexplicable disturbance, Klahr is surely one of the great artists of our time". -- Miguel Valverde, Curator Indielisboa 2013

Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He teaches in the Theater School at Calarts and is represented by The Anthony Reynolds Gallery.