Rarely does a filmmaker appreciate and explore the complexities of sound and image as equally—and deeply—as Iowa-based filmmaker Leighton Pierce.  A musician before he was a filmmaker, Pierce’s relationship to sound has always been a crucial one; he has suggested that “the soundtrack is the movie, [and] the image is there to give people something to look at while they listen.”  While such an idea can be misleading—for Pierce’s images are lush, beautiful, and meticulously constructed—one of the prime reasons Pierce moved mostly to video by the late 90s was because of a dissatisfaction with 16mm film sound reproduction.  Nevertheless, in these films Pierce constructs evocative and nuanced soundscapes that open for us a vast world of perception, enhancing the camera’s lyrical contemplation of the visual details of his everyday surroundings.  Transformed by a purely cinematic engagement with lens technology, camera placement, and the diffraction of light bending around objects, these spaces are sublimely rendered—all the more spectacular for the degree of attention afforded a window curtain blowing in the wind and a child’s toy buried in the grass.  As described by critic Scott MacDonald in his book Garden and the Machine, these impressionistic interpretations of reality, which interweave the domestic and art-making worlds, offer serene revelations of “transcendental domesticity.”