Untitled (Sewing)

two channel video & sound installation
13 min. 40 sec. loop
2004

Untitled (Sewing) is a two-channel video and sound installation set outdoors 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 that play concurrently and adjacent to each other on a two-sided screen in the center of the room. This mirroring creates a unified virtual landscape through an intersection of time and space.

At the midpoint, 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 and ball of thread. The performer, dressed in the artist’s clothes, hairstyle, and glasses, is accompanied by her identical, temporal counterpart. Together they generate 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 two characters stitch together the landscape and the video image, their personas oscillate between passive and aggressive modes, making it difficult to assign the roles of protagonist and antagonist within a narrative agenda. In this way, the work subverts the viewer’s identification with the hero and raises questions about representations of self, impersonation, and the double. Within a psychoanalytic framework, the video draws a literal parallel between the performed stitches and the suturing of the viewer’s subjectivity, which is traditionally achieved through editing and camera positioning.

Through 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 how it is fabricated in narrative. In the end, landscape and time function as the protagonist, calling attention to how they are represented and constructed within cinematic conventions.

credits:
Director, Camera, Editor: Julie Orser
Performer: Rebecca Whitehurst
Sound: Jon Irving
Special Thanks: Rebecca Hobbs, Emily Newman, John Kim & friends

exhibitions:
 Mid-Res, Stevenson Blanche Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 2004