Saturday, March 28, 2026 at 7:30 PM
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
*Light Years Expanding* is a further elaboration of *Light Years*, Gunvor Nelson’s journey into the Swedish landscape in which she blends animation with live-action. Whereas movement was one of the prime characteristics of *Light Years*, *Light Years Expanding* revolves more around the image-work, foreshadowing her last and most complicated collage film *Natural Features*.—*Professor* *John Sundholm, Stockholm University* Director: Gunvor Nelson. “I was enormously impressed and bowled over by the beauty and artistry. It is one of the few films that I have ever seen that gave me the same feeling that I get when I see painting that I really respond to on a gut/heart level. The images are very powerful. The poetry and the subtlety of the content too. The editing/rhythms all seemed perfect. The sound track kept disappearing from consciousness (exactly right), but never stopped working with the pictures. Masterpiece.”—*filmmaker* *Robert Nelson* Director: Gunvor Nelson. *Field Study #2 *develops further Nelson’s painterly animation aesthetics. This time the imagery is not created by a recording camera after which they are reworked, but instead the images and sounds appear out of their own world. The soundtrack consists of animal sounds and a serious male voice reciting names of animals in Latin. It is a hilarious work that makes fun of the educational film and our expectations upon the film screen to constitute a window to an outer world.* Field Study #2* urges one to look and listen while emphasizing the comic and absurd, the latter a trait that runs through so much of Gunvor Nelson’s filmmaking and which was the impetus for her to start filming with Dorothy Wiley in the ’60s. The film ends with a thank you to Dorothy Wiley.—*Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University* Director: Gunvor Nelson. “In *Natural Features*, Gunvor Nelson mingles hundreds of still images with 3-D objects and ‘real’ images photographed through glass layerings into a free-associative and playfully bizarre form of animation. Perhaps no film has more successfully blended an evident passion for painting with a sensitivity to filmmaking such as lush pigments alternate with and punctuate the different photographic layerings.”—*curator* *Steve Anker* Director: Gunvor Nelson.