Margaret Honda is an American experimental filmmaker and artist based in California. She began her career in sculpture, performance, photography and installation art before turning to film.
Honda's work in both visual art and film deals specifically with materials and their intended and incidental purposes, an interest she attributes in part to her academic studies in material culture. Asked about Recto Verso, an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1994, in which visitors were required to step over objects, climb a ladder, and place their hands in holes they could not see into, she said, "The seduction is there in the materials themselves and in your expectations of what you're going to find, how you think something is going to operate." Honda's work often incorporates biographical content and reflections. Recto Verso draws on eye-strengthening exercises she did as a child to correct a problem with her vision. In Sift, an early work shown in the 1992 show "Relocations and Revisions: The Japanese-American Internment Reconsidered" at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Honda addressed her own understanding of the effects that internment had on members of her family. More recently, her 2015 installation at Triangle France, titled Sculptures, recreated to scale all 15 of the artist studios she maintained over the course of her career. Writing in Mousse Magazine, Tenzing Barshee notes that, in keeping with Honda's "nonlinear and atemporal approach to history," her use of biographical elements "do not stem from a project of nostalgia but rather from an active engagement with historicity, continuously interweaving different points in time to produce work infused with the present." Her first film, Spectrum Reverse Spectrum, was made without use of a camera by exposing 70mm print stock to precisely calibrated colored light. Artforum critic Nick Pinkerton writes, "Running the length of a single reel of wide-gauge stock, the film follows exactly the eponymous trajectory, chameleonically transitioning across the visible light spectrum, from violet to red and back again, beginning and ending in black. The simple effect, achieved using a contact film printer, is something like a prismatic sunset in a distant galaxy... " The feature-length Color Correction was made using the timing tapes that corrected the color for an unidentified Hollywood feature. Both films, along with Wildflowers , concern the materiality of celluloid film and processes involved in its exposure, resulting in works that slowly evolve an awareness of the uses and unintended consequences of light in the filmmaking process. Honda has written a book about her work, Writings, co-published by Triangle France and Künstlerhaus Bremen.
