TRAILER, 2 mins. 30 secs.

CARLOS: BEING OF LIGHT (2021) is a feature-length documentary by Tyler Stallings about Carlos, an artist making visible the invisible through his paintings that act as visual metaphors for his encounters with extraterrestrial beings of light. 

Carlos asks us to reconsider human evolution, spirituality, and ecology, and why is it that we humans must feel in control of nature? For Carlos, empathy is the key to future relationships, whether with fellow humans, the planet, or Beings of Light. Watch how Carlos, in his artistic process and through the retelling of his alien encounter experiences, collapses the emotional distance between himself, the landscape, and the subjects of his portraits, along with the aliens he encounters.

Carlos recounts his formative encounters from traveling to the island of Iona in 1990, part of the Scottish Inner Hebrides Islands, intrigued by it being an intersection of Celtic legends and Catholic expansion. On that trip, he took a hike on Easter Sunday up one of the island’s hills that turned into a strange odyssey for Carlos, during which he lost consciousness for six hours. He awoke to a hauntingly beautiful image—a beam of light, not of this world, reaching down from the skies into the ocean—and photographed it. He refers to the experience and what he witnessed as the “Lightfall,” which inspired him to paint and write about these formative encounters with beings of light.

After retiring in 2005, as a fine arts professor for 36 years from The University of the South, located on a mountaintop in Sewanee, Tennessee, he constructed IONA: Art Sanctuary nearby; an homage to the island, and as a place to explore the mysteries of his encounters with Beings of Light. Over the years, scholars have compared his encounter experiences with those by other Catholic saints and mystics. Harvard psychiatrist, John E. Mack, devoted a chapter to Carlos in his groundbreaking and influential book from 1994, “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.” 

CARLOS: BEING OF LIGHT culminates with a summer festival at IONA: Art Sanctuary, celebrating the creative voices in the Sewanee community. Under a starry night sky, the festival concludes with the unveiling of a monumental, outdoor light sculpture, “The Celestial Sky.” It will provide an opportunity for years to come for others to come closer to Carlos’ revelations about his encounters with “light” as a gateway to the consciousness of the universe. 

Stallings first met Carlos in the mid-1980s when he took painting classes from him at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a four-year liberal arts university located on 10,000 acres on the Cumberland Plateau. Stallings came to understand the true nature of Carlos’ experiences that he only partially alluded to earlier, when he read about them in John E. Mack’s book, “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens” (1994). At the time, Stallings was conducting research for an exhibition that he curated, “Are We Touched? Identities from Outer Space” (1997), presented on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the reported UFO crash in Roswell, NM, on the landing of Pathfinder on Mars, and in the same year of the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate group in the San Diego area. Since that time, Stallings has curated several exhibitions that circle back to that show and incorporate speculative fiction themes, such as “Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas” (2017) that was part of The Getty Foundation’s PST:LA/LA initiative. Stallings has curated numerous contemporary art exhibitions since 1995, along with editing and publishing several books. 

Currently, Stallings is the director and senior curator at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College. Previously, he was the artistic director at the Barbara & Art Culver Center of the Arts at University of California, Riverside (2006-2017) and chief curator at Laguna Art Museum (1999-2006). He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts with a concentration in studio art and critical writing. 

He collaborated with Naida Osline on their first film, HOMETOWN PROUD (2020), which appeared at several film festivals, nationally and internationally. Currently, it is screening at the Portland Film Festival, Oct. 6-Nov. 8, 2021. They are working two other film projects to be announced at a later date.