"I followed you into the nothing, like a wave, and then was" - Lara Mimosa Montes, THRESHOLES
I followed you into the nothing, like a wave, and then was (2021) is a video of a sheet of thin white plastic blowing in the wind. The video takes its name from a line in Lara Mimosa Montes’s book of poetry THRESHOLES — a book about grief and the search for a language to describe what is indescribable in loss. From this incomplete sentence which hangs on it’s ending, “and then was”, the video opens toward the sky and a plastic sheet from a construction site that slowly flutters before it. Multiple instances of the same plastic video are glitched, edited, and collaged on top of each other, expanding the shifting form of the plastic into the sky and the edges of the video frame itself. Throughout the video an electronic synth soundtrack, recorded and mixed by me, creates moments of harmony and subsequent dissonance with the image’s dissolving forms. I’m interested in the materiality of digital videos, their algorithmic bodies, and the forms that appear when manipulating these files. So often videos don’t capture the essence of what they try to represent — and so I try to capture that: the failure to hold on and the shifting forms left over.
Still studying video, noise and language. Still walking to the water's edge, holding for just a moment, then leaping off. Video and sound by me, title lifted from a line in THRESHOLES by Lara Mimosa Montes.