REMEMBER : REPLAY : REPEAT
@ THE UICA

"Photographs are ghostly apparitions reanimated in reproductive mediums...melancholic and longing for an unrecuperable past."

Roland Barthes wrote these words while mourning his mother’s passing. He refers to an emotional reunion with his mother when he discovers a scarcely visible photo of her as a small child, uncovering what the writer W.G Sebald refers to as; "the portal by which the living and the dead find each other again."

The artwork you are considering is both universal and a highly personal memento mori. After my own mother’s death, I was consumed with guilt…I questioned each decision, made on her behalf, during her final hours. Like Barthes, I sought refuge from my grief in our family photo album. However, each photograph was a fugitive locked in time, unmoving, mute, and exiled to the irretrievable past. I wondered...if a photograph could bear witness to elusive memories, what would the moving image offer? I turned to family 8mm films in search of my mother.

Initially the 8mm sequence was a resurrection, but as the artwork evolved it became a visual analogy of my inability to assist my mother. REMEMBER : REPLAY : REPEAT: …I incessantly loop/replay her final hours over and over in my mind in an attempt to rearrange, restructure the sequence of events in order to change the outcome...

until all memory becomes longing and loss replaying in an endless loop.

Sequential still images are frozen or may be rearranged by the viewer. Apparitions exist in this found footage video loop of unending repetition, converging with static images and reflective mirrors of repetitive images...leaving only traces of life without a future.

REMEMBER: REPLAY: REPEAT was the winner of the 2011 ArtPrize Juried Award for Time-Based Art.

...and the shadows of shadows are the shadows of angels...

__Stan Brakage

BORDERS & BOUNDARIES

the human face at once veils and unveils the soul...

___Georg Simmel

Let your fellow man be your mirror...

__ Anonymous

The mirror, a mysterious and unsettling object, as simple as it is complex, returns our own image back to us, reveals invisible spaces...through the reflection of his image in the mirror, man sees, discovers and questions himself.

__ Ana Paula Rebelo Correia

A border can encompass a territory as large as the boundaries of the observable universe, or as intimate as the metaphysical perimeter of each individual’s consciousness. Each face, or physiognomy, is a nuanced, reticent, mysterious threshold or barrier to an inner life.

BORDERS & BOUNDARIES, is a visual investigation of this fragile perimeter and our subjective assignment of the boundaries of self and of the internal and external infinity which is the other. A large mirror (replete with allegorical symbolism) is an integral element of the conceptual framework of BORDERS & BOUNDARIES. The mirror resides, in a liminal space, existing between the boundaries of the interior self, external self, and the other. Within the context of the artwork, it is a line of demarcation and reflection.

Each visitor is seated directly in front of a (two-way) mirror. Once the visitor is seated, the two-way mirror will reflect their image. The small camera embedded in the artwork will trigger code that instructs the square monitor (located behind the mirror) to play one of 30 video portraits. Within 6 seconds, the video portrait (randomly chosen by the code) will fade up and play. As the video fades in, the mirror image of the visitor will be replaced with a blended image of the visitor’s reflected face and the subject of the video portrait, blurring exteriority, interiority, identity and compressing the metaphysical space. Additionally, embedded in the artwork is subverted iconography, alluding to the boundaries that both define and separate us. Once the visitor exits the exhibition space, the video fades to black and the reflective surface of the mirror is restored.

APOGEE / PERIGEE

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence:   her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to affirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens  of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

― James Joyce, Ulysses 

APOGEE and PERIGEE refers to the orbital distance from the Earth to the Moon. Apogee is the farthest point from the Earth. Perigee is the closest point to the Earth and it is in this stage that the Moon appears larger.

The small video installation consists of six individual layers of etched plexiglass. The final (back) layer contains an embedded video visible through the six transparent blue layers. Each individual plexiglass layer contains images of various subjects; vintage astronomy charts, the formula for the Golden Mean, numerous unique illustrations. These images generate a composite portrait in relationship to the subject. Additionally, each of the six plexiglass layers can be removed or added to increase the complexity and distance or depth of the video portrait from the viewer of the installation.