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 excerpts
Video is liquid. In constant flux, it can only be held by its container.
Video is a reflection. Beneath the image’s surface lies invisible layers we may not fully perceive but are nonetheless there, influencing us.
When we interface with technology we become submerged in its interconnected web of impact on ourselves, society, and the environment. It is no longer possible to remove ourselves within our deeply embedded position.
Can searching for the tipping point – moments where the apparatus of video reveals itself – allow us to perceive its layers of influence and perception, broadening the distance between object and image?
Video offers an opportunity to look closely and listen deeply. We are submerged, and the only way out is through. This piece offers another mode of engagement with video - one that is meditative, slow paced, slipping away yet within reach - like trying to hold liquid.
3 minutes
Direct animation and digital video with sound
2025
Single channel video that examines the distance between the flame and its image.
17 minutes
4 channel video, 4 channel audio
2024
A four-channel video, four-channel audio installation on how technology has disembodied the human experience, and thus severed our relationship to the earth.
The installation constructs a digital atmosphere that raises a microscope to the processes through which nature is converted to the screen.
2:40 minutes
16mm direct animation and acrylic painted screen
2025
Direct animation - painting 16mm film frame by frame - is an intentionally tedious, labor intensive, yet messy and haptic process.
The technique traces back to 1920s experimental film, but has a lesser-known history as a means for women to branch outside of textile work despite confining gender roles of the time. While rarely credited for their work, most pioneering experiments in direct animation were born out of women applying textile practices to analogue film material.
Marleigh’s use of direct animation is a conversation across time as she considers her relationship to matriarchal legacy on personal, historical, and deep time scales. Her scraping, painting, and splatting onto analogue film becomes an homage to female animators who have also been underrepresented in film history. The resulting abstract, cameraless film calls attention to the materiality of film as a means of representation.
2:00 minutes
35mm direct exposures and sound
2025
The storm is not a line we can see but a smell in the air, a thick dew on your skin, a sound in the distance. These exposures are remnants of objects once there - marks, gestures, imprints. While I cannot translate the visceral upheaval of the storm, I can show the markings left behind. Traces remains after the storm. What can we know from these imprints on the earth?
Live electronics, vocal processing, and audio responsive visuals generated using Max MSP.
Pictured: performances of “Brainwave 9999” and “Black Hole.”
Work featured on Montez Press Radio “AfterSense” show March 2025.
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.
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.