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| Video Still from In the Offing by McLean Fahnestock |
You
often talk about your work as negotiating the public arenas of the
institutional or political as they refer to deeper human desires that
play out more personally. In other words your work looks for personal
longings in the archives of a history museum or NASA. Could you talk a
little about where the inspiration for that kind of investigation
started because it seems to be a pretty consistent thread in your work?
It initially came out of an
interest in exposing emotion. I began to play with videos of political
figures engaged in interviews with the idea that I could slice them open
and show the real person working behind the political character. I then
expanded my source to include other public figures that embody an
ideal; olympic athletes. It was a short jump to astronauts and then
NASA. Space exploration was something that really captured the
relationship between human desire for excellence and a government
institution. Moving now in to museums and libraries I am still
contemplating what makes a historic character and what lies beneath that
but I am also investigating the way that those characters are portrayed
and their deeds preserved. I am looking at what it takes to make it in
to the institution and if the validation of inclusion make automatically
those deeds truth.
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| From the Fahnestock Expedition series |
Your work often subtly plays with language and exploits the
personal and political connectedness you feel for example, in your recent
pieces that depict islands are gold leafed. You seem to be
approaching the connectedness between vacation and vacancy. Could you
talk about that work and describe the series for me?
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| From the Good Director Islands series |
The series "Good
Director Islands" is about the western idea of paradise and the longing
that goes along with it. Made of desktop wallpapers found by searching
'paradise' and etched with song lyrics, the works allude to the desire
to escape to our own personal island. A popular fiction portrayed as a
daydream. The title reveals the personal aspect to this series. My
Grandfather and Great Uncle, in their book Stars to Windward, claimed to
have discovered an island chain in the South Pacific. Their fantasy
became a published reality. But thanks to technology, it has shifted
back to fantasy. The coordinates in the book point to an empty spot of
sea.
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| From the Fahnestock Expedition series |
Your pieces that explore your Grandfather's Fahnestock
expedition also seem to go further into that social space of collective
memory as it relates to the personal. The resulting images seem almost
like spy images taken furtively with a hidden camera in a library,
almost as if you are stealing little pieces of your Grandfather and even
yourself in the privacy of the museum backrooms. Could you expand on
the idea behind the series and some of your experiences relating to the
series?
I am at the beginning of a
large project based on the three voyages made by my Grandfather and
Great Uncle. It is an effort to build a bridge between my time and
theirs. Between their experiences and my own explorations. By working
with the institutions that they were working with and visiting the
places that they visited as well as balancing the more personal
side–their lives and families and what happens after the expeditions
end.
When I am in
the back rooms of museums I get a rush of discovery. I can understand
how it would be easy to get hooked on that and decide to make it your
vocation. It is also when I feel most connected to my Grandfather. Being
that I can not remove the articles from the institutions, I collect
them on site in anyway that I can, I scan documents with a wand scanner,
capture sound with a tiny digital recorder and video with an equally
small camera.
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| Still from Love Sick |
Your video pieces, Love Sick and In the Offing seem much more
personal than the piece you are most famous for that features the space
shuttle blasting off on various grades of film stock gridded rather
formally. Your latest pieces deal with antiquated films but they are
images of the sea and as the sea line ebbs and flows there is a feeling
of the presence of the viewer as a conscious separate eye with a
personalized even poetic experience. Can you talk about the differences
between these different kinds of video pieces and what you have learned?
I think that
because I am dealing with something closer to me, to my family, that I
am taking a different approach. The shuttles were about the presenting
the entirety of the life of the orbiter and the emotional impact for a
whole generation. I used the very rigid and formal grid and set up time
as my parameter for the entrance and exit of the clips. Because I am
shifting my focus from working with material that is well known to
footage that is not as immediately recognizable I have been considering
other ways to make sure that the impact is still there. I am working
more on developing the soundtracks and taking a more organic and lyrical
approach to editing.
I have always been interested in presentation of
video and now I am looking even more into the technologies and options
for my work. How the video is experienced has to be considered by
artists and curators alike.
