Sorrow Halved #3: Falling Together / Falling Apart (2025) [Upcoming/Unreleased]
35mm, Color, 5 min, Sound
Email hoganseidel at gmail dot com for screener or print rental.
In 2019, Hogan Seidel and Gabby Sumney decided to tackle a yearly collaboration called Sorrow Halved–from the German idiom “Geteilte Freude ist doppelte Freude, geteilter Schmerz ist halber Schmerz.” or “A joy shared, is a joy doubled. A sorrow shared, is a sorrow halved.” The two queer artists took a shine to the idiom as they considered ways to subvert traditional notions of authorship and the experimental canon in their practice and their teaching.
The “sorrow” of singular creative genius that is often hailed in the experimental world felt counter to the lessons they were bringing to their students and to their approach to making queer art.
For one year, Gabby and Hogan took the same strip of 35mm clear leader and passed it back and forth every month. There were no restrictions on how to interact with the strip or limitations on materials. The artists were simply responding to each other through gestures.
This is the 3rd film birthed out of this practice's iteration.
in the streets of june (2025) [upcoming]
Super 8, color, 4 min, Sound
Email hoganseidel at gmail dot com for a screener or print rental.
Layered in the grain of Super 8, in the streets of june captures the vivid contradictions of a Seattle Pride parade: a kaleidoscope of joy and resistance, fractured and reframed through layers of multiple exposure. The film's textured imagery merges the vibrant defiance of the parade with the imposing presence of police lines, their shadows cast across the glitter-strewn streets.
Scenes of dancers and banners dissolve into one another, overlapping with sharp flashes of riot gear, creating a haunting interplay between celebration and surveillance. The camera lingers on fleeting moments while the weight of unseen power hovers, ever present.
Clear (2024)
16mm, color, 6 min, Sound
Email hoganseidel at gmail dot com for a screener or print rental.
Clear is a visceral confrontation with the illusion of "safety," where altered 16mm footage and layered audio reveal the quiet violence surveillance imposes on trans and gender-nonconforming bodies.
Gab (2024)
16mm, color, 3 min, Sound
Email hoganseidel at gmail dot com for a screener or print rental.
Building on my previous work, Konstantin (2023), this piece continues my exploration of nature alongside significant queer individuals in my life. Filmed across various forests, arboretums, and gardens in Seattle and Vancouver with artist and friend Gabby Follett, this film employs intricate visual layering, biofeedback sound art, and hand-processed film to delve into themes of queer ecology. The work celebrates the beauty of non-hierarchical, non-binary, and non-human-centric ways of experiencing queerness in and as part of nature.
Konstantin (2023)
16mm, b&w, 3 min, Sound
Email hoganseidel at gmail dot com for screener or print rental.
Konstantin is an experimental film shot on high-contrast black and white 16mm film using a single 100ft reel. The film is an in-camera edit with triple exposures, creating a layered and complex visual language. Through this aesthetic, the piece explores themes of queer love and queer ecology. It invites the viewer to enter a unique and poetic world, where the boundaries between the human and natural realms blur and merge. Pushing against human exceptionalism & into a world where there is no ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural.’
Can a walk in the forest, a kiss between lovers, a roll of film, the touch lichen, liberate ourselves from these hierarchies?
