Mike Stoltz

Mike Stoltz makes experimental films that foreground the fundamental properties of the medium: image, sound, and time. He works primarily with 16mm film and highlights its physicality by editing the film by hand and projecting it in its original format. Stoltz constructed Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View) using footage of passersby he filmed from his art studio in East Hollywood interspersed with still images from an archive of photographic slides he found at a rummage sale at the Echo Park Film Center. These images picture the streets of Los Angeles covered with wheat-pasted movie posters for Underground, a 1976 documentary about the Weather Underground. Due to the age of the slides, the full spectrum of color has deteriorated into a gradation of pinks. Whether Stoltz’s workaday footage is seen side-by-side with the faded slides or across the room from them, color—the evidence of time’s effect on material—differentiates the images. Interrupting the dual “documentaries” is a black-and-white moving graphic accompanied by a 16mm optical soundtrack that features “pink tone” frequencies. By “exploding” the finished film into its component parts, Stoltz furthers his engagement with the (im)materiality of the moving image to emphasize the physical and dimensional experience of perception.

Mike Stoltz was born in 1981 in Miami. An experimental filmmaker, he works directly with the tools of cinema — images, sound, and time — to probe the medium of film. Recent presentations and screenings include Los Angeles Filmforum (2023); Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN (2022); Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne, Australia (2019); LaborBerlin (2018); WORM, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2018); Cavia, Amsterdam (2018); La Lumière Collective, Montreal (2018); Milwaukee Underground Film Festival (2018); Headroom Cinema, Iowa City, IA (2017); Microlights Cinema, Milwaukee (2017); Nightingale Cinema, Chicago (2017); A.P.E. Gallery, Northampton, MA (2017); Sight Unseen Cinema, Baltimore (2017); and No Nothing Cinema, San Francisco (2016); Recent festivals include Light Field, San Francisco (2025); International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2024); Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY (2024); Los Angeles Festival of Movies (2024); Edinburgh International Film Festival, Scotland (2024); Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne, Australia (2024); Milwaukee Underground Film Festival (2024); Moviate Underground Film Festival, Harrisburg, PA (2024); Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Canada (2024); Media City Film Festival, Windsor, Canada (2024); and Anthology Film Archives, New York (2023). Stoltz is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Artist Project Grant via the Echo Park Film Center (2016); Best Experimental Film award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival (2015); and Top Prize Award at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival (2011). He earned a BA from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL (2011), and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA (2014).