Grotesques #3: Flowers and Guns
Grotesques #3: Flowers and Guns, 2015, single channel HD video, 3:00 m:s, 16:9 format, audio, color
Does anybody think those Italian frescoes just move a little bit when you are not looking?
I perform on video things I am bad at, things that scare me, imagined and real fears. I perform all the characters and I have a level of performance anxiety that once was marked by crippling migraines and nausea. This image was shot over a year. Grotesques is named after the cave that once was Nero's palace in Rome, where this quilt like style of image arrangement was discovered by the Renaissance Italians. I like this name as it has come to mean "ugly" and "inappropriate" where once it described images cataloging order, beauty, color, property and possessions. This particular image describes many things: the least recognizable might be Rapunzel's wandering in the wastelands with her children in search of her missing prince. There is also a Venus Anadyomene shot on the coast in Haifa, an inappropriate dèjeuner sur l'herbe, coupling bugs, Magritte nesting dolls, a semi-naked Victory, and very clumsy yoga. I like to create improbable elisions of space within the image and in relation to other images. My process of piecing together an image is like a cut paper collage in which all the bits of paper contain moving images.
