Margaret Honda
Illustration: Margaret Honda working with Vince Roth at Fotokem.
Margaret Honda is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums. She is known in the cinema context for her pure color 35mm and 70mm works: Color Correction (2015), Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (2014), and Equinox (2019). Her cameraless, frameless, and non-narrative film work can be interpreted within the experimental/avant-garde and structural film traditions, but her creative process as an artist should be defined as distinct from such. Honda utilizes projected film prints as a medium for further exploring the relationship between color and film as an object-based form, bringing cinema into the visual arts terrain and probing the methods of creative inquiry within film practices.
Her moving image work – screened only in theatrical settings – can be considered far from pure movement, as they center momentum and visual shifts in a system of colors as they graduate from one hue to the next. Using light and celluloid as its media, Honda’s film-based work reinterprets a formation and considers its presence in a broader space. There are no negatives or camera originals for her film prints; they operate as distinct works existing as a result of timing tapes and direct collaboration with a film lab, drawing attention to a film print’s materiality as indexical of skilled process rather than one resulting from a captured image. When projected in a theater, Honda’s works wash viewers in the shifting silence, reorienting audiences to a distinct cinema that takes one back to moving image’s origins: the awe of encountering light on a screen.
This interview with Margaret Honda was conducted asynchronously by Patricia Ledesma Villon via email in January 2026.
Patricia Ledesma Villon: The prompt for this filmprojection21.org series is “why film prints?” but I want to dive deeper and tie it directly to your practice in sculpture. Sculpture can be thought of as visually “static” but your work plays the dichotomy between “static” and “moving” as it uses a traditionally moving image form: film. I’m thinking how Color Correction was installed in the galleries as prints housed within their blue film cans for the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2016 then the work – as a 35mm print – was screened as a timed event in the Hammer’s Billy Wilder Theater during the show’s run. How do film prints allow you to explore a relationship between “static” and “moving” in your work?
Margaret Honda: Any film print suggests the potential for another experience once it’s projected, but it’s also revealing to look at what happens to it on its way to being projected. When I exhibited prints of Color Correction and Spectrum Reverse Spectrum in their cases at the Hammer Museum, I was thinking about both these things. The screenings took place during exhibition hours so a technician would retrieve the cases and leave a sign on the pedestal stating that the work had been temporarily moved to the theater for projection. Even in Los Angeles not everyone is familiar with a film print, [in] that they require the [attention] of people beyond the audience as well as a specific location and allotment of time. So, it might be less the relationship between “static” and “moving” and more the materiality of film prints that I’m exploring. They exist in the same space as us.
PLV: Your work is driven by the experiential and their affect, whether it be working with or experiencing objects, how they appear, or how we relate to a larger process the objects are part of. We see the latter through your close collaboration with film labs and technicians for the creation of Color Correction and Spectrum Reverse Spectrum. Making and showing works on film are two distinct undertakings, and for Color Correction you didn’t see the film until completed at the lab – it’s a work generated purely out of a process. How do you think about color as it appears as a timed and printed hue on the photochemical film medium versus as a viewer’s subjective experience when projected?
MH: For each of these films the colors are a result of the production process and I was willing to accept whatever came out of that process. I was focused on what they would be as prints and wasn’t really thinking about what they would be as projections. Spectrum Reverse Spectrum is a ribbon of incrementally changing color with no frame lines because there is no camera original. Color Correction, also made without a camera original, cuts between different colors, but the cuts and the colors are based on an unknown feature. Just as the appearance of each film was something outside of my control, so is a viewer’s experience of them when projected.
PLV: Artists who utilize film often discuss film’s limitations as integral to their approach with it as a medium. How do the limits of working with film impact or influence your work? What do the limits of film allow you to draw forth?
MH: About ten years ago, Eastman changed the emulsion for 70mm print stock. When I needed a new print of Spectrum Reverse Spectrum, the new emulsion was so problematic that we had to redo the timing for the entire film. Going forward, the real limitation will be the availability of people who have decades-long knowledge of the materials and the machinery. It may not sound like the most generative constraint but it has made me think about what my films really are.
PLV: What do film prints allow you to explore that you can’t explore with other mediums?
MH: Actually, working with the extreme limitations of film has made it possible for me to explore new ways of doing pretty much anything. Film is the most generous medium I’ve ever encountered.
Margaret Honda is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Frac Lorraine, Metz; ICA Miami; and the Hammer Museum. Her films have screened at the Berlinale, Courtesane, TIFF, S(8) – Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Svenska Filminstitutet, Anthology Film Archives, Centre Pompidou, La Cinémathèque française, Harvard Film Archive, and REDCAT.
Patricia Ledesma Villon is the Assistant Curator of Moving Image at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Photos courtesy Margaret Honda.
