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Writer-Director, filmmaker, photographer. I make pictures and stories across every form.
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#reyparla#experimentalfilm#parlastudios#artinnyc#nyc#lightsurviveseveryformat#glitchart#videoart#futurumunknown#flickerfilm
Recent posts
Honored to be part of Laas / Absan / Peldía: Caribbean Cinema Cultures at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University — Gallery 103, John and Susan Berding Family Foundation Gallery, through January 31, 2027.
How do you mourn a film?
Caribbean cinema is haunted by loss and absence. Since the late 19th century, Caribbean nations have tried to build film industries under slavery, colonialism, climate crisis, and economic developmentalism — leaving a catalog of lost films and gaps in the canon. Hollywood’s racist depictions, propaganda, and exploitation raise another question: do all images need to be seen? And yet cinema also keeps the memory of those no longer with us.
The title names loss or absence in Jamaican Patwah/Guyanese Creole, Haitian Kreyòl, and dialects of the Hispanic Caribbean. The show also takes up the recurring “death of cinema” debates — from synchronized sound to streaming and now AI.
Is cinema dead? Is it still with us? Or is it undead?
Artists: manuel arturo abreu, Zoe Butler, La Vaughn Belle, Ojos Caribe, Mahlet Cuff, Leandro Feal, Mónica Félix, Richard Fung, Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle Morillo, Rey Parlá, Samuel Sarmiento, Michaëlle Sergile, and Christin Washington.
Curated by Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez, assistant curator; Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez, assistant professor of film studies at MSU; and Diaspora Solidarities Lab fellows Zoe Butler, KV Bailey, Luis Prieto, and Nehemías Toro Padrón. Supported by the MSU Federal Credit Union.
Born from research by the Manchineel Project, a microlab of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab — a Black feminist-led partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
With appreciation, honor, and gratitude — a special thank you to curator Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez.
Installation view, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, 2026. Photo: PD Rearick
04 Nov 2026
NEW ART TERMS
Words are a kind of light. They arrive before the picture and stay after it, a silent song still playing in the next room. I do not invent them. I find them already in motion, on the wall, in the feed, in the mouths of strangers, and I edit them the way I once edited film, by hand, frame by frame, until the mistakes become the grammar.
These twelve frames are the world now, seen through a door left slightly open. Nothing is named. Everything is present. What you read is only half of the image. The other half is what you bring to it. #reyparla #parlastudios #artinnyc #nyc
The aura never left. It moved into the language.
“I am the reader and the read. My terms are simple: look until the sentence becomes a picture, and the picture becomes a self-portrait of whoever is looking.”
06 Oct 2026
Title: Light Survives Every Format
“I have been scratching film since the nineties, cutting light directly into emulsion with my hands. This film asks what that gesture means now, when the image arrives as data instead of celluloid. So I wounded the file the way I once wounded the frame. I corrupted my own photographs, wove them through each other, let them decompose in public. The pictures fall apart on purpose. The words do not. Every format we have ever invented has failed, and the light has come through all of them. That is not a tragedy. That is the whole reason to keep making images.” ~Rey Parlá
#LightSurvivesEveryFormat #ReyParla #ExperimentalFilm #GlitchArt #VideoArt.
Photosensitivity warning: this film contains rapid flashing images. Light Survives Every Format, 2026. 59 seconds.
07 Sep 2026
Title: FUTURUM, A flicker film for 378 words.
In the early nineties on Miami Beach, before the beach became a brand, the cinema I fell in love with was made with whatever was at hand. A camcorder, a monitor, a wall, a word or in my case needles and exact knives to scratch celluloid. For other experiments, I would tape a sentence in front of the lens, or shoot a page and let the tape roll, and the word itself became the picture. Video text poems. They were cheap and urgent, made by people who had things to say and no budget to say them with, in English, in Spanish, in the mixture the city actually spoke. I was running with a crew that painted letters on walls, and I understood immediately that a word projected in a dark room was the same act as a name sprayed on concrete. Text as image.
Language as the thing you look at.
This film goes back there. It is 378 words, one word to a frame, on flat fields of color borrowed from Miami’s own light, cut in the flicker tradition the black frame as instrument, rhythm as the subject, the eye asked to keep up and sometimes to fail. Half the words are in English and half are their Spanish twins, and at the center of the film they are laid over each other until neither reads clean. That doubled, ghosted word is the truest picture I know of a life lived on the hyphen. The positive words arrive as pauses, the way a breath does. I made it now because the world in 2026 feels like a flicker. A strobe of headlines, each one gone before it lands. Time superimposed. I wanted to take that speed and give it a form, then let it slow, and let it resolve on the one word both languages agree on. Esperanza. Hope. It is not a promise. It is a place to stop, feel, and see with the mind’s eye.
Rey Parlá, Brooklyn, 2026
#FuturumUnknown #FlickerFilm #ExperimentalFilm #StructuralFilm #AvantGardeCinema
06 Sep 2026
Alliance Cinema, Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, early nineties. Tony Conrad’s The Flicker is thirty minutes of black frames and white frames and nothing else.
There is no image in The Flicker. There is only the rate at which light is interrupted. And yet I saw color. Rings. Pulses. Forms my own retina built out of the gaps. The film was not on the screen. It was in the room, in the bodies, in the space between frames where the eye refuses absence and makes something anyway.
I walked out onto Lincoln Road and the street was still flickering.
That night rewired what I think a film is. Not a window, a frequency. Something that happens to you. Every scratch-graph, every hand-marked frame since, comes back to that room.
This is the cockade at that threshold. Each ring strobing at its own rate, beating against the others at the boundary. The form is never fully present. It is assembled in you, or it does not exist.
Conrad made The Flicker in 1966. The republic was arguing with itself then too. Some things cannot be shown. They can only be induced.
Contains stroboscopic light. Watch with care.
Parla Studios · New York · 2026 reyparla.com.
03 Sep 2026
Three New Works:
Variations on a Borderless Field:
Three luminous abstractions that represent only themselves, not the natural world. Or maybe they do, through you, the viewer. Light, space, the stillness of arrested movement, time as my material: pictures that did not exist before, what I’ve been after since I started in experimental film. The three hold together as one field broken into three separate and unique weathers, a descent, a rise, a long diminishment: Vanishing Variable, Vertical Silence, and Elegy in Grey.
Available through @benrubi_gallery & on X @benrubigallery, New York City
#ReyParla #VariationsOnABorderlessField #BenrubiGallery #ConcretePhotography #AbstractPhotography FineArtPhotography ColorField ContemporaryArt PigmentPrint CameralessPhotography NewYorkArt Chelsea PhotoDesign NYC Tokyo Paris L.A. Miami London Montreal Finland ReyParla©2026 benrubigallery.com reyparla.com
23 Jun 2026
Laas / Absan / Peldía: Caribbean Cinema Cultures
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. Gallery 103: John and Susan Berding Family Foundation Gallery
August 22, 2026 – January 31, 2027
How do you mourn a film?
Rumba Abstracta (1996–98), my 35mm scratched and hand-painted film, will be part of this exhibition curated by Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez @curadoraboricua, Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez, and Diaspora Solidarities Lab fellows Zoe Butler, KV Bailey, Luis Prieto, and Nehemías Toro Padrón - a project of the Manchineel Project, organized with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and Johns Hopkins University.
In the company of Manuel Arturo Abreu, @lavaughnbelle, Ojos Caribe, Mahlet Cuff, Leandro Feal, @monicafelix, Richard Fung, @hatoreina, and @natalialassallem, @samuelsarmientostudio, Michaëlle Sergile, and Christin Washington.
A 35mm strip wound by hand was always, for me, a way of letting memory enter the material. To find that gesture held within this Caribbean conversation — with these artists, these curators, this question - is a quiet honor.
Photograph by my brother @joseparla in our Brooklyn studio. Represented in New York by @benrubi_gallery. Grateful to Barron Sherer and the @oolitearts community, where my film “Sporadic Germination” last lived. Full details at @msubroad.
#CaribbeanCinema #ExperimentalFilm #35mm #MSUBroad #LaasAbsanPeldia HandPaintedFilm reyparla.com ReyParlaStudio parlastudios.com
10 Jun 2026
The Four Corners of the Sphere
Before the map was drawn, the green was here,
a pulse below the name, a ring, a sphere.
The north leans in, the south already knows,
the eye that never blinks is what still glows.
What whispers through the moss needs no reply
the beacon finds the bone before the sky.
Put down your hand. The ground will do the rest.
The signal was the silence in your chest.
11 Mar 2026
• UltraVioletPerceptionRay •
The color borrows from the field behind it
and the field in front of it
and calls the theft its nature.
A frequency no naked eye will catch
passes straight through the seeing
into the bone.
Watch the one who doesn’t know it’s happening
the tear that came before the reason,
the hand that moved because the room required it.
No teacher has a name for this.
The exercise failed. The truth arrived.
What the body knows, it keeps
below the visible spectrum
rings expanding from a point
no instrument was built to find,
the light only darkrooms read,
the wound the wound forgot,
the code inside the ordinary thing
that looks, to every eye that passes,
like nothing at all.
10 Mar 2026
Before the first word, it was there
not waiting, just present, the way dark
doesn’t wait for light.
It will be there after the last word too,
holding the shape of every language
that ever tried to say the thing
that cannot be said.
Even now it stands at the front of everything,
the mouth open,
making no sound
the point from which all rings expand,
the eye that sees all places at once
and says nothing,
because nothing
is the only word.
06 Mar 2026
The clock does not begin with now
it starts inside the lava’s vow,
where pressure forged the dark to glass
and sealed the centuries as they passed.
The priests looked in and saw their face.
The warriors saw the edge of space.
The blade was time. The mirror too.
The darkness held a point of view.
What seems like absence, seems like night,
is just the clock before the light
a gear still turning in the deep,
a luminous thing that time could keep.
The angle shifts. The obsidian wakes.
The darkness glows. The clockwork breaks
not into ruin, but into song:
compressed and patient, bright, and long.
01 Mar 2026
The Light Inside -
The dark holds the bright inside its hand.
The bright holds the dark — both understand
that every mirror contains a door
to another mirror, and one more,
and one more still, until the rings
reveal the light that endings bring,
the teal inside the violet sky,
the answer living in the why.
What breaks apart is what completes.
What falls away is what repeats.
The lotus rises from the deep
through all the dark it had to keep.
Look inward long enough and see
the light was always looking back at you,
endlessly.
28 Feb 2026
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