My Own Artist's Statement

Below is the artist's statement that accompanied my MFA thesis work in 2008. I've also included the videos that the statement outlines, so you can see the connections between the written statement and the actual work:

VIDEO SELF-PORTRAITS

My works in the MFA thesis exhibition Three Way express my concern with the external, variable, transitory, reciprocal, cyclical nature of “self” as an ongoing happening, and my grappling with the nature of my “self” as a mean between the two extremes of the binary phrase “me and everything separate from me.” The work consists of four videos: Conversations With A Wok, Robert’s Land, Margie, and West Carroll County. I refer to the works in this series as “video self-portraits,” though they do not initially conform to the traditional conventions of self-portraiture. They are, however, a very personal exploration of how my own particular “self” or “I” has participated in an ongoing external exchange of experience. I view existence as operating within a constant state of becoming rather than within human-imposed binaries of language (new and old, now and then, you and I, etc.). Therefore, I see this process of the “self” happening in a loop of experience as applicable to everyone—not just to me.

Each of the four video self-portraits included in the exhibition is approximately eight minutes in length, and in chronological order by production date, playing in a continual loop. A particular structure is adhered to throughout the series: each video has an audio element which is a recording of my voice telling an autobiographical story overlaid on a video element that consists of one single, stationary shot viewed in real time, without editing cuts (with the exception of Conversations with a Wok, which has occasional cross-dissolves). Additionally, ambient sounds recorded at the shooting location are used as presence tracks and, at specific moments, as an element of the narration itself. Two senses of time function in each piece: the slower, more meditative time of the stationary visual, and the more traditional narrative cadence of the story. The spoken text in each work recounts a memory, or a tangled weave of related memories, and the accompanying image displays an object, combination of objects, or place that holds some particular significance to me. I am incapable of looking at this object or particular feature of a place without thinking of all of the myriad symbol and representational connections with which my “I” has signified the object or location and the manner in which it projects back onto me. These connections are narrated by the video’s text.

In these works, I find my “self” “conjured” by the relationship—the dialogue—between image and spoken text. The liminal space that connects these elements, that un-locatable happening, is central to each piece and yet does not exist until the moment that image and text come together. Like James Elkins, I have abandoned “the words ‘the observer’ and . . . taken up residence in the verb ‘looks,’ literally between the words ‘object’ and ‘observer’.”