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Wheeler Winston Dixon

"Wheeler Winston Dixon is a masterful film editor. His sensitivity to the movement within the frame and of the camera itself allows for fluidity in his editing that is exuberant and refreshing. It is as though his films tap into our collective unconscious by exploring the surface realities that permeate our lives." - Bruce Rubin, Former Associate Curator of Film, Whitney Museum of American Art

"Dixon applies tonal, structural and chromatic strategies, such as color inversion, to live footage to create shifting images that also engage with political and philosophical undertones [creating] film poetry as painting for the twenty-first century." - Sarah Tremlett, The Poetics of Poetry Film (Intellect Press, 2021)

"There are already enough images in the world. In my videos, I prefer to use existing imagery, playing with it to the point of abstraction to create an other-worldly experience. Although the original images are rooted in the real world, the final product exists in a phantom zone, existing only as long as the image is projected on the screen. At the same time, I hope to seduce the viewer into believing that however unreal these images are, they still have some sort of temporal reality. It is this gap between the actual and the imagined that informs all of my work." - Wheeler Winston Dixon

Dixon's films have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam), Studio 44 (Stockholm), La lumière collective (Montréal), The BWA Katowice Museum (Poland), The Microscope Gallery, The National Film Theatre (UK), The Jewish Museum, The Millennium Film Workshop, The San Francisco Cinématheque, LA Filmforum (Los Angeles), The New Arts Lab, The Collective for Living Cinema, The Kitchen, The Filmmakers Cinématheque, Film Forum, The Amos Eno Gallery, Sla 307 Art Space, The Gallery of Modern Art, The Rice Museum, The Oberhausen Film Festival, Undercurrent, Experimental Response Cinema and elsewhere.

Dixon's complete film work from 1966 to 2003 is archived in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Dixon's contemporary video work is collected in the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Entire contents of this website copyright © 2015 - 2022 Wheeler Winston Dixon. All rights reserved.

  1. Nothing Can Go Wrong

    "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken

    "I wish I were supernaturally strong so I could put right everything that is wrong." - Greta Garbo

    "I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong." - Benjamin Franklin

    "The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever." - Herb Caen

    This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.

    Copyright © 2016 Wheeler Winston Dixon. All rights reserved.

  2. Beat Box

    "It's a boom box with a beat - or, 'an electronic device that adds a backbeat, manipulates sounds, and mimics musical instruments' - or just a brief divertissement." - Wheeler Winston Dixon

    This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.

    Copyright © 2016 Wheeler Winston Dixon. All rights reserved.

  3. The Peaceable Kingdom

    "One day in the life of a group of African elephants - protected, for the moment, from the predations of humankind." ― Wheeler Winston Dixon

    "And finally I saw that the very land itself had risen, that the sunbaked land had taken form as something vast and alive, and was in motion. The land walked as multitudes, their strides so utterly of the earth that they seemed the source of the very dust. The cloud they raised engulfed us, seeped into every pore, coated our teeth, seeped into our minds. Both flesh and metaphor. That big. And you could see their heads, like warriors’ shields. Their great breaths, gushing in and out, resonant in the halls of their lungs. The skin as they moved, wrinkled with time and wear, batiked with the walk of ages, as if they lived within the creased maps of the lives they’ve traveled. Travelers across landscapes, and through timescapes. The skin moving like swishing corduroy, textured and rough but sensitive to the slightest touch. The grind of their cobblestone molars as, sheaf by sheaf and mouthful by mouthful, they acquire the world. All the while uttering the contented purring of mounds of memories." ― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

    This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.

    Copyright © 2016 Wheeler Winston Dixon. All rights reserved.

  4. Stop

    "A call for an end to violence. Dedicated to Bruce Baillie, whose brief film 'A Hurrah for Soldiers' (1963) - of which Baillie wrote simply 'Dedicated to Albert Verbrugghe, whose wife was killed in Katange by UN soldiers, 1963' - has always struck me as one of his finest, and least appreciated works." - Wheeler Winston Dixon

    This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.

    Copyright © 2016 Wheeler Winston Dixon. All rights reserved.

  5. Human Scale

    "Civilization is crushing us; you can see it in the scale of the buildings, the elaborate outdoor malls where no one ever goes, the walkways that carry us from one building to another without ever touching the Earth - and yet we keep endlessly walking, intent on whatever errands we think are important." - Wheeler Winston Dixon

    "One thing is sure. The earth is now more cultivated and developed than ever before. There is more farming with pure force, swamps are drying up, and cities are springing up on unprecedented scale. We’ve become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce, and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.” - Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, Roman theologian, 200 AD

    This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.

    Copyright © 2016 Wheeler Winston Dixon. All rights reserved.

  6. Rose V

    "The last in my 'rose' series - at least for the present time." - Wheeler Winston Dixon

    This video was created using footage and soundtracks in the Public Domain, or released as CC0 Public Domain materials, and is made entirely from recycled, repurposed and refashioned images and sounds.

    Copyright © 2016 Wheeler Winston Dixon. All rights reserved.