A STATEMENT and A FEW THOUGHTS POSSIBLY RELATED TO THE IMAGES IN THIS ROOM
Thought 1: The following is absolutely true.
When I was 3 years old, or 4, but definitely not 5 because I remember my 5th birthday being in Cody, I lived in a house in Casper with an unfinished basement. There were 14 stairs leading down – I wish I could say there were 13 stairs as this would bring a more mystical layer to the story I am about to continue, but I believe in my 3 or 4 year old brain I calculated 14 – and even then I wanted 13. An event occurred in that house, on those stairs leading down to the basement, which has influenced and confounded me more than any other event in my life. Yet, even to this day I cannot say for certain if it happened.
On this particular day I was playing at the precipice of the stairs. I’m not entirely sure which Star Wars figure I had in hand, but it must have been one of those supreme totems of childhood. Really, the toy isn’t important, but the fact I eventually tilted over and began what should be a harmful decent down the stairs, this is important. I was not injured and the hard surface of the many stairs did not contact any part of my body because I was gently caught by an unseen force, lowered down past each stair, floated really, and was deftly sat down on the basement floor. A miracle and oddity past what many would call normalcy. However, I quickly, without question, took advantage of the new force and gleefully climbed back up and in full faith leapt down the staircase and was once again carried down. I cannot recall how many times I went down or for how many days it lasted, but it surely happened many times and with no negative result. I was so fearless I was eventually running before each jump.
Truly, these things happened. For sure. Yet, at a later point in life I began to consider the possibility of having a dream of these events while 3 or 4 years old. Perhaps such fantastic experiences in dream could not be held from waking life. But to be honest, I don’t think it matters which dimension they happened in. The essence of these moments were burned into my flesh, my brain tissue, and more importantly impressed something into my then malleable spirit. But over time, the malleability of that particular spot in my spirit has hardened into a precious callous and I cannot access today. It’s there. I can see the moments moving around inside the frosted shell. In another chamber of existence I can freely open the sensation of floating down the stairs and the feeling of concrete faith. Somehow these sensations provide more viable evidence of the events occurring in physical reality. But again, I’m not sure it matters.
Thought 2: The process slash how the images are made: statement mostly redacted – remove emulsion, re-apply with concern.
Thought 3: The Index and Documentation
The term index or indexicality can be related to emulsion and physically based photography and motion picture film in the following way: an object in one from is documented in another form in such a way to provide clear enough representation of the original object. That is to say, a photograph or motion image film represents the original object. The film is an index, a reference link, a physical object that points to another.
I have specified emulsion and other physical based photography and motion image mediums and left out digital mediums for a particular reason. Physical mediums have a unique quality of interacting directly with the light that contacted and reflected off the original – this light bounced off my Grandmother, passed through a lens, contacted the emulsion of the film. The film was then passed through a chemical process to reveal the indexed form of my Grandmother. In a certain spiritual sense, you may say the essence of her was preserved. The translation from analog to digital in digital mediums sever the physical link.
In working in the mentioned mediums, I find my emotions differ depending on the objects indexed on the film. With professional and commercial cinema films and stills, I focus on either disrupting popular culture or attempting to create alternative narratives using the figures in the frame. Though staged and commercialized, these films still provide index, documentation, of the actors and sets.
With films I have personally shot, it can become nearly painful to manipulate the faces and bodies of loved ones. Most often these pieces reflect my own disheveled memory and fear of that memory becoming increasingly disjointed. I was there, I shot the images. I have both the memory and documentation of the event. Once the documentation is distorted I have no guarantee the memory of being in the moment will stay.
But with photos passed to me from my lineage, both direct and through marriage, all of the pieces in this room fall here, I find myself approaching them as detective, uncovering what may have been lingering under the surface of the quaint family gathering – the awkward, possibly forced interactions, candid, character revealing postures, children squinting in the direct sun, stills of table settings. I wonder what the energy and emotional temperature was when the participants were suddenly encapsulated. Perhaps these manipulations are a way to communicate past the obvious factual of the photo – that’s Aunt Gloria and Uncle Roy Thomas sitting on a couch in their early years of marriage – and asking the viewer if they can perceive anything underneath the flesh of the moment.
Thought 4: Tony Conrad was Probably Right
While in my first year of the Master program in the Department of Media Studies in Buffalo, NY, I created a film loop and projector performance piece called Another Project About the Degeneration of Human Memory. In this piece, having shot 16mm motion picture film of my daughter playing at a playground – she was about 2 years old then. I then performed the piece by projecting and looping several seconds of the film while slowly destroying it by applying a razor blade directly to the film over the duration of about 10 minutes. I scripted the piece by allowing the loop to run free one cycle then applying the razor blade for the rest of the cycles. The untouched cycle was to represent the actual lived moment and the latter cycles representing the planted memory that slowly falls apart overtime.
When I later presented this piece in a first year defense session, the late monumental media and sound artist Tony Conrad, then a professor at SUNY Buffalo, asked me what I thought of the piece. I explained my case of failed human memory, how this was my testament and fear. Tony then said, “no, this isn’t memory at all.” Maybe he was right.
Thank you for your time.