Neither Here Nor There,
But Altogether Elsewhere
(05.2019)
(FILM AND ANIMATION, EXHIBITION)
Situated yet unsettled, the play of language enables us to mediate distances, to make sense of our frames while seeking other ways of being with and for. Through dialogical processes of meaning-making, these works attempt to reroute and reorient so that we may learn to see each other -- and to see ourselves.
Sites of the everyday and of dominant and popular culture are discursive spaces where hegemony and power relations are consented, contested, and possibly transgressed. Emerging from this semiotic dispositif, our forms and languages render possible different ways of seeing, listening, reading, and thus, different ways of relating, acting, and responding. They formulate specific possibilities of response.
Language and meaning, like the institutions we inhabit and that inhabit us, are grounded in personal, embodied knowledges and unevenly desedimented histories. Things are certain, yet simultaneously unsettled and in constant negotiation. These works foreground this negotiation, inviting encounters between here and there in the distance and brokenness of our language. And as we are always and already in a performative, discursive play which can reveal and reroute how we make sense -- if we find ways to listen carefully -- we might briefly glimpse elsewhere altogether.
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POETICS OF INFORMATION
(05.2019)
(FILM AND ANIMATION, EXHIBITION)
Attempting to be objective, rational, sometimes invisible, these interfaces frame how one encounters stories of others far away and nearby, directing a particular gaze which story events, affecting our capacity for sense-making and interpretation. How can we become aware of our frames, acknowledge how they border and limit, and further negotiate and insist on other ways of knowing and being with?
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PARTIAL ATTEMPTS IN BROKENNESS
(05.2019)
(FIILM AND ANIMATION, EXHIBITION)
Drifting among the video debris and fragments left in the wake of a still-unfolding aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, people continue making attempts to recover from, return to, or retain some sense of everyday life. Ritual practice becomes a method of coping, of seeking ways from — no matter how senseless. Our traumas will continue to linger in the body.
OPENNESS
(04.2018)
(FILM AND ANIMATION)
Openness as a form of Emptiness. To engage with other ways of seeing and imagine other possible ways of being with, we must be open. It is necessary for Alice to be open to navigate Wonderland as she enters the strange world and encounters what is unknown to her. To engage in any dialogue, to listen as well as voice, one needs to be open; our emptiness gives space for one another to be.
IMG NATION
(02.2018)
(FILM AND ANIMATION)
Taking Hito Stereyl’s “In Free Fall” as a starting point, free fall suggests the feeling of groundlessness, the loss of a perceived stable horizon, fracturing into many horizons and perspectives, fragmented, twisted, and multiplied. It is losing all sense of orientation. Submerged in waves of images, the modern subject is subjected to anxious overstimulation. “Come with me, and you’ll be, in a world of pure imagination…” Gene Wilder sings, lulling viewers like you and me into a mesmerized paralysis, or, a kind of sedated vacancy. This hyperreality, breathing and alive, render insignificant peoples’ agency of attentiveness. Our groundlessness, our free fall, our disorientation is in part produced out of our manufactured consent — we continually re-submerge back underwater where everything is distorted and there is no air to breathe.
TOWARD A RESPONSIBILITY OF AESTHETIC DISTANCE: Thoughts on Visual Communication * Communication is the very fabric of relation. It is an atmosphere of sensing and responding — endlessly conferring. Through this, we’re able to access something: a friend, a home, a feeling, our surroundings, ourselves. It is embodied sense-making. For us humans, it is language in its most plural form. ** Visual communication, which involves graphic design along with the multitude of visual traditions and varying forms of writing and mark making, is attentive to how visual forms mediate sense. It looks at how visual forms and their practices as mediums and platforms render possible/impossible specific ways of knowing. Attempting to navigate this requires us to look closely at the contexts which frame particular visual forms (from the past, from the future, in the present). Aesthetics becomes a matter of ethics. It matters what histories we surface, who we suggest listening to and through what forms, how this is done, who with, and who for. *** In my practice, I see visual communication as sense-making tools. Its traditions are situated and entangled, so it becomes necessary to confer with other ways of knowing across the already polycultural and multi-disciplined. This is to say that our work begins and ends in study; I believe this to be the responsibility of our discursive acts. In my work, I must recognize my position in relation, navigate commitments, and surface the visual negotiation of different perspectives, ways of knowing, and ways of relating. This is where I hope to contribute: the slow, tedious, and necessarily collective efforts of remaking and reorienting sense. ****
TOWARD A RESPONSIBILITY OF AESTHETIC DISTANCE: Thoughts on Visual Communication * Communication is the very fabric of relation. It is an atmosphere of sensing and responding — endlessly conferring. Through this, we’re able to access something: a friend, a home, a feeling, our surroundings, ourselves. It is embodied sense-making. For us humans, it is language in its most plural form. ** Visual communication, which involves graphic design along with the multitude of visual traditions and varying forms of writing and mark making, is attentive to how visual forms mediate sense. It looks at how visual forms and their practices as mediums and platforms render possible/impossible specific ways of knowing. Attempting to navigate this requires us to look closely at the contexts which frame particular visual forms (from the past, from the future, in the present). Aesthetics becomes a matter of ethics. It matters what histories we surface, who we suggest listening to and through what forms, how this is done, who with, and who for. *** In my practice, I see visual communication as sense-making tools. Its traditions are situated and entangled, so it becomes necessary to confer with other ways of knowing across the already polycultural and multi-disciplined. This is to say that our work begins and ends in study; I believe this to be the responsibility of our discursive acts. In my work, I must recognize my position in relation, navigate commitments, and surface the visual negotiation of different perspectives, ways of knowing, and ways of relating. This is where I hope to contribute: the slow, tedious, and necessarily collective efforts of remaking and reorienting sense. ****
