Mike Stoltz

I am an artist who works primarily with film and video. Using the tools of cinema (moving images, sound, special effects, projection and montage), I explore time, mythology, memory, and the medium itself. The works are rooted in a bodily encounter with the subject. This manifests on screen in instances of engaging with performers (and performing) from behind the camera, chance-based interventions in landscape, physically moving the camera in concert with architectural structures to create images-within-images, or directly addressing the audience in the form of gesture and language. Physicality continues in the process of editing the pieces, cutting directly on 16mm film rather than with a computer and composing the soundtracks from tape music and live sound generated with collaborators.

The films work to reposition the familiar and nearby in a way that is both intimate and quizzical. My images reveal satellite dishes perched on the ocean, scrappy bands playing in storage units, stroboscopic office park architecture, body parts careening across the screen, and kitsch relics overcome by moss and mold. There is a correlation between the constant and the variable; a concrete wall begins to spin through the sky, performers place the camera between their bodies, nature overtakes the man-made, and history folds in on itself.

I am currently a cooperative member at The Echo Park Film Center, where I program films and teach classes. I am a lecturer at Cerritos College and California State University San Marcos.

http://mikestoltz.org

Films