statement:
Untitled (Seaming Time) is a two-channel video and sound installation set outside in a romanticized western landscape. The video was shot entirely from one camera position over the course of a day from sunrise to sunset. In the installation, this extended take is divided into two projection sequences. The projections play concurrently and adjacent to each other on a two sided screen in the center of the room. The result of this mirroring creates a unified virtual landscape through an intersection of time and space.

During the mid point, when both sequences are nearly equal in luminosity, two identical figures emerge to perform one exaggerated act of sewing with an oversized papier-mâché needle, ball and an extended piece of thread. The performer (dressed in the artist’s clothes, hairstyle, and glasses) accompanied by her identical and temporal counterpart generates a series of choreographed gestures including fluid movements, cartwheels and a tug of war. This laborious, peculiar, and ritualistic activity becomes an absurd childlike domestic dance. As the identical characters stitch together the landscape and video image, their personas oscillate between passive and aggressive modes. Therefore, the characters make it difficult to assign the protagonist and antagonist roles within a narrative agenda. In this way, the work subverts the viewers’ identification with the hero and raises questions about representations of self, impersonation, and the double. Inside a psychoanalytic framework, the video draws a literal parallel between the performed stitches and the suturing of the viewers’ subjectivity that is traditionally attained through editing and camera positioning.

By way of repetition and the mirroring of space, the piece charts the relationship between performed time, cinematic time, and time in nature. Within this topography, the work negotiates how time is perceived and its fabrication in narrative. In the end, landscape and time function as the protagonist calling attention to how they are represented and constructed within cinematic conventions.

performance: Rebecca Whitehurst
crew: Emily Newman, Rebecca Hobbs, Jon Irving
sound design & music: Jon Irving
projection screen construction: John Kim