Installation view Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, MA 2024
Installation view Fridman Gallery, NY 2025
Installation view Royal College of Art, UK 2025
10 min
4 channel video - digital video and 16mm direct animation with ink and river water
accompanying 8 channel video displayed on used i pod touch
2025
Click here for video excerpt
Like Trying to Hold Liquid approaches liquidity as both material condition and metaphor for digital life. Video, like water, exists in constant flux, held only by its container. Images drift across reflective surfaces where visibility becomes unstable, slipping between depth and surface, abstraction and recognition. Beneath the image lie invisible layers that remain difficult to perceive yet continue to shape experience. Technology appears here not as separate from the real world, but as its reflection: immersive, pervasive, and impossible to fully grasp. The work proposes another mode of engaging the moving image, one that is slower, meditative, and resistant to seamless flow - like trying to hold liquid.
4:21 minutes
4 channel video, cyanotypes, and UV prints on glass
2026
To Be Frozen stages moments where motion collapses into stillness: videos freeze without ending, images fracture across reflective surfaces, and visibility becomes partial and delayed. Iceberg imagery, cyanotypes, and direct animation on 16mm film move between preservation and loss, foregrounding the unstable relation between image and world. Layers of UV-printed glass obstruct and refract the image, resisting seamless visibility and fixed interpretation. Rather than treating interruption as malfunction, the work inhabits freezing as a perceptual and bodily condition - a suspended state where meaning remains unresolved, distributed across fragments, reflections, and moments of drift.
17 minutes
4 channel video, 4 channel audio
2024
Click here for video excerpt
Landscape of the Medium considers the growing separation between embodied experience and the environment under conditions of technological mediation. Across four channels of video and sound, landscapes dissolve into layered signals, reflections, and abstractions, foregrounding the reductions inherent in the translation of world into image. Within digital space, body becomes avatar, presence becomes interface, and sunlight becomes pixels. The work does not position technology outside nature, but examines how systems of mediation reorganize perception itself, producing a relation to the environment that is increasingly distant, fragmented, and disembodied.
3 minutes
Direct animation and digital video with sound
2025
Image of a Flame examines the unstable distance between an object and its representation. Through digital distortion and direct animation applied onto 16mm film, the flame is repeatedly transformed, obscured, and reconstituted as image. What appears immediate becomes mediated, filtered through layers of texture, interference, and material translation. The work approaches the flame less as subject than as a limit point for representation itself: an image that resists fixation even as the apparatus attempts to capture it. Between analogue mark-making and digital manipulation, the flame flickers between presence and abstraction.
3 minutes
3 channel video with sound embedded into textile panels
2025
Hold Up The Heavens, The Dwelling Place is a multi-channel video and textile collaboration between artists Marleigh Belsley and Olivia DiMichele. The installation proposes the garden as a site riddled with duality and contradiction. The garden represents an idealized utopia, an abundance yet to come, and encourages tireless, unrelenting pursuit. Inspired by stories of the Garden of the Hesperides and the nymph who dwelt there, the installation references fairytale-like motifs of the golden apple and enchanted trees. Working with hand crafted mediums as textiles and animation, both artists consider how their practices serve as acts of gardening.
2:40 minutes
16mm direct animation and acrylic painted screen
2025
Messy Hands approaches direct animation as both material process and temporal conversation. Painting, scraping, and marking 16mm film frame by frame, the work foregrounds the labor, repetition, and physicality embedded within analogue image-making. These gestures become a reflection on matriarchal legacy across personal, historical, and deep-time scales, while also acknowledging the often overlooked histories of female experimental animators. The resulting cameraless film resists seamless representation, drawing attention instead to the surface of the medium itself: marked, unstable, and visibly shaped by the hand that touches it.
2:00 minutes
35mm direct exposures and sound
2025
Night of the Storm approaches the storm indirectly, through its traces rather than its image. Created through direct exposures on 35mm film, the work gathers remnants: marks, gestures, imprints left behind after an event that resists full visibility. The storm emerges less as spectacle than as atmosphere - sensed through sound, moisture, pressure, and distance. These exposures do not attempt to translate the upheaval itself, but linger within what remains afterward. The film considers how images function as traces of contact with the world, carrying fragments of presence while withholding the totality of the experience that produced them.
Live electronics, vocal processing, and audio responsive visuals generated using Max MSP.
Pictured: performances of “Brainwave 9999” and “Black Hole.”
12 minutes
Sound (electronics and vocal processing) for performance
2025
PLUNGE is a collaborative work between Indonesian performance artist Victoria Kosasie and American time-based media artist Marleigh Belsley exploring the silencing of women’s voices and the search for catharsis, using water as a place of solace and release. In a ritual of unravelling, Kosasie moves from silence to eruption as she screams, sings, and exhales into a tank of water. Her voice, muffled and submerged, is captured and transformed by Belsley’s live soundscape of distortion, echo, and reverb. In a world women live with the constant undermining of their lived experiences, the work questions: “How do women carry rage that has no clear outlet, no permission to be expressed?” This piece sits between performance and sound art, unfolding as an act of catharsis and reflection.