Rising Stars: Meet Wilson Stiner of Atlanta

Today we’d like to introduce you to Wilson Stiner.

Hi Wilson, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
For a Stiner (Ashkenazic for stoneworker), it feels bizarrely fitting for me to find myself in Stone Mountain after following a rocky path to Georgia three years ago. The pandemic shakeup moved my new family out of the mountains of Southern California, necessitating a reformulation of plans and points of connection to my art-life missions.

Exploring consciousness through storytelling, be it in mixed media, traditional filmmaking, mythopoetics, or experiments in immersive techniques, is an innate impulse that comes from a deep desire to translate far out perspectives. Generating that kind of expansion in an audience can prove transformative. I find it incredibly nourishing to delve into a story that effectively takes someone out of their own conditioning to make way for empathy and curiosity.

Projects have taken me to far flung locations and offered a vast array of viewpoints, each time rewarding me with that expanding vision. Since relocating to the Southeast at the height of the #stopcopycity movement with all of its intersectional concerns, I continually find myself in the center of many repressive forces desperately hanging onto dying power structures.

The work I am engaged with through my media outfit Stiner Bros. aims to compost negative cycles of prevailing culture. We employ regenerative storytelling to flex our imaginations and build a bridge to the most harmonious futures we can envision. Supported by communities such as the local incubator PushPush Arts, postactivist cultural collective The Emergence Network (TEN), and the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta’s Inclusive Futures program most recently, I continue to refine my tactics. Be it through environmental campaigns, lo-tek world building for a screenplay, or directing a passion project with indigenous artists, my focus remains on actionable insights for the audience.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
A project I spent several years and lots of energy on has never seen the light of day due to internal politics amongst its gatekeepers. Though it was difficult to accept, I am truly grateful for the impulse I found in the rubble to tether myself to a vastly differentiated and deeply meaningful trajectory.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
When the pandemic hit, I had just become a father. I took the opportunity to slow down and savor the moments in the mountains of the Chumash.

As a creative outlet, I returned to stop motion animation with a mixed media edge I had not quite seen yet. Creating sets and figures I could shoot one frame at a time seemed like a perfect fit for an infant’s sleep schedule. Throw some lucid dreaming practice into the mix with the help of HemiSync and you get some real inspiration. Hausu Mountain Records commissioned two of these pieces (music videos for “觀音 Prayer for the Abuser (abridged)” by Fire-Toolz and “Rhododendron pt. II” by d’Eon). In certain circles the psychedelic and melt-your-brain mythological aesthetics on display with those two pieces are particular to my work, though I also employ restraint in gritty, grounded sensibilities, like in my most recent narrative piece, Continuum Hack, which is currently in festivals and galleries.

My fascination with the nature of identity and the line between fantasy and reality are central to my artistic pursuits. That intersection provides an incredibly rich springboard for my unique perspective to claim an angle on subject matter of all kinds when in collaboration with team members or clients.

I am emboldened by my current partners, who invest in work that doesn’t just entertain but actively re-tunes and re-patterns.

How do you think about happiness?
Discovery remains the most reliable source for joy in my life, as it makes clear that all has not been done, and I somehow find it most frequently in those most familiar to me, my wife and son.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bio.site/wilsonbstiner