Using a painstaking stop-action animation process, Boulder artist Stacey Steers spent four years piecing together 4,000 handmade collages to create "Night Hunter," a kind of gentle, old-fashioned horror film with a quirky Gothic flair.
The 15 1/2-minute work, which marries footage of silent-film actress Lillian Gish with fragments of 18th- and 19th-century engravings, has a deliberately anachronistic, slightly awkward look. Think Edward Gorey meets William Kentridge.
It's a spellbindingly evocative if slightly unsettling montage, with fragmented scenes of the wonderfully waifish Gish merging enigmatically with yellow-tinted worms and weirdly oversized eggs.
The piece will be screened continuously through Sunday in the Fuse Box, an installation space on the fourth floor of the modern and contemporary galleries of the Denver Art Museum, between Broadway Bannock Street on West 13th Avenue.
Also on view are some of the collages that Steers used to make the film, as well as a kind of elaborate Victorian doll house, titled "Night Hunter House," with excerpts of the film showing on screens in each of its tiny rooms.