Rolling Out A Slab, 2015

HD Video and clay. Dimensions Variable.

Video to be projected large and play in a continuous loop. The loop repeats every 6 min. Part of a larger work "Western Standard Time" which includes ceramic bacon sculptures placed on the floor in front of the video. The light from the projection illuminates the sculptures.

Wedging, 2015

HD Video.

The work I am presenting is incomplete and could continue looping if technology and energy allowed. It is called “Wedging” after the name for the action occurring in each video. Wedging engages a similar movement to kneading bread. It is designed to expose and release bubbles from the clay at the beginning, before the clay is sculpted into something else, something useful or fantastic. Wedging is a foundational process, preparing the clay with a clear and solid body. The basic structure of each video is the same however each presents a different clay body and the duration of the movement is contingent on the qualities of each body. The set of videos has the potential to exhibit itself in multiple ways. Each way would produce unique but similar results.

One option is to show the six videos that you can now see on Vimeo as a single projection. In this scenario all videos start at the same time. They all move forward and backwards in their loops and run into each other when they do. And despite the potential for grounding formed through a “clear” foundation formed in wedging and a perpetual circular structure in looping, the images becomes unfamiliar, uncontrollable, and impossible to take in as a whole. Fragments of sound and image collide and dissolve, sometimes in cacophony sometimes in rhythm: chaos and cosmos. A sense of completeness evades the viewer despite the possible presence of a whole enclosed in the screen and the possibility of viewing the loop again.

A second option (which presently only exists in the imaginary) would be to have seven monitors playing the seven videos (even though six are visible in the first option, seven videos exist). This option introduces new variables to the first since each video would now stand separately on a monitor in a room together. Access to the whole grows ever more distant. Unless the monitors are stacked in close proximity, a viewer will need to physically move their body to see each video and will not be able to see all the videos at once. In this scenario, the sequence in which play is pressed on each video orchestrates the intersections of the videos. Now an uncertainty arises as to the sequence of the videos and the multitude of possible positionings of each video in relation to each of the others and the subsequent iterations that build from the knowledge of each previous sequence. The piece as a whole will never be played or viewed the same twice, despite the continuous looping and circular structure. Who is the author? The creator of the videos or the finger that pushes play or the viewer and their sense of self? I wonder about the viewer; what stands out, what resonates, what feels real, and what is imagined?

In the center of the videos are multiple clay bodies. Each body could very well stand in for a human body, a social or a political body. The perception of motion shifts between a kind of violence and a kind of caress. The perception of speed distorts as a laborious repetition reverses into a foreign mechanical motion with a perceived quickening. The reversal resists the certitude of the forward progression of time. No great thing is every built out of this clay, no solution is ever reached. They all live in a realm of indeterminacy and perpetual becoming. The question of time persists becoming entangled in the time-based media of video.