six channel video installation
flat screen lcd monitor dimensions: 10” - 15”
2002

A nightmarish reality.  

Nowhere to hide.

These are the basic concepts in play for Without Warning (Flying Vaginas Are Trying To Eat Me). Taking source elements from a low-budget, genre film, this pieces rearranges and reinterprets existing footage. While much commentary about such films has derived from feminist ideology, i.e. the inherent misogyny of horror films, less has been attempted from a male vantage point.

In Without Warning (Flying Vaginas Are Trying To Eat Me), the viewer is confronted with the ultimate, masculine nightmare, the vagina dentata.  In endless loops, the creature attacks, whooshing and swirling and chomping around the viewers head and torso. The viewer is confronted with a literal interpretation of castration anxiety. That the source film manifested this fantasy in such a straightforward manner speaks to the unmistakably direct nature of this fear with an almost comic literalness. Masculine fear’s metaphoric interpretation is made literal. The viewer, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, gains access to a commonly hidden and protected part of the male psyche.  
 

single channel video
total running time:  8 min
1998

Inspired by a pop culture obsession, The Hollywood Videos interpret celebrity and cinematic icons as private, esoteric fantasies.  By creating and (re)presenting these fantasies, the artist attempts to align himself with those who are famous rather than those who are not.  The arcane nature of the fantasies provokes the question of why.  Commentary is left to the audience.

The Hollywood Videos focus on the sex, violence, and masculine bravado encountered on movie and television screens and entrenched in its surrounding culture.  While these videos stand as testimony to an obsessive interest, the nature of that interest remains vague.

single channel video
running time:  4:10 min
1996

What happens when a seemingly benign action gets compulsively out-of-hand?  In earlier work, this question was addressed by utilizing a “you are there” style of video.  Staged in a realistic manner with static camera and minimal sound, the duration was dictated by the action.  Rip, however, begins in the realm of the fantastic.  The floating point-of-view, chiaroscuro and inhumanely repetitive soundtrack place Rip in a nightmarish world.  Beginning and ending in total darkness, Rip can continue endlessly.

The subject, a young woman, exists as fragments in the dark.  As the light initially finds her, she initiates her performance.  The viewer is enveloped in her shadowy world where self-destructive behavior can scar.  In scratching and picking, the subject begins to rip her skin.  Is this an attempt to destroy her youth, her beauty?  Or is it the perversely pleasurable pain one feels when squeezing a pimple?  Is it everything in between?  By smearing the blood and skin,  the subject attempts to transfer the pain and suffering away from her and create an emotional distance.  In the end, left scarred and bloodied in the dark, she waits to begin again.

These videos explore the symbiotic relationship between artist and audience.  As an artist, I wish to manipulate my captive viewers by cultivating tension between the creative act and its presentation.  The audience and I participate in exposing ourselves and our personal, possibly unnerving, predilections.  Exploring this uncomfortable connection exists as my primary motivating factor.  I call attention to the not-so-benign pathology that hides itself in intimate physical and psychological spaces.

In presenting myself, I exploit the vulnerability manifested in the acts performed.  The blood, the pain, the anxious compulsions are not negative; they are the by products of the creative act.  Focusing on the violent or, rather, violating behavior draws viewers in as they align themselves in one way or another with the transgressions.  Subjecting people to the depictions of my aggressive tendencies pushes them to confront their own tendencies or, at the least, their own visceral responses.

The condition created by the simple and direct depictions and the minimal sound, shifts the focus from the viewed to the viewer by emphasizing his/her own presence.  In this sense, the viewers become voyeurs and are implicated as provocateurs, accomplices, or subjects.  Ultimately, the pieces call for a response, whether one of aversion or fascination, horror or laughter.  The audience watches but not without paying the price of personal exposure. 

The video performances benefit from the medium’s inherent sense of immediacy.  In referencing closed-circuit or amateur video, these pieces draw on the conventions of video as surveillance and as recorder of private moments.  The veracity of the acts is clouded by both their realism and performative elements.  Their strength lies in the tension.