One
day, while riding my bicycle, I noticed a small family of deer in a
wooded yard and stopped to watch them. These deer did not run away or
freeze up – instead, the largest one stepped towards me and I responded
by doing the same. We continued in this give and take routine for a few
minutes, stepping and looking, and I felt a quiet clarity and relief
throughout the exchange.
For all I knew I was a trivial intrusion to the creatures, but regardless, this encounter bewildered me. I fixated on the memory of it. I began to draw connections between this experience and others, including in particular the memory of a bony deer carcass decaying in the woods. It was as if I had tapped into a bank of moments that bore similarly undisclosed significance and that longed to be set in a new context. Yet as I now reconstruct the event in my mind, I fear that I fabricate its original profundity. A distance grows in the relationship between the encounter and myself and I fumble with my memory, blurring or stretching details to fill holes in my interpretation. Without conscious intent, the authentic existence of the moment has been replaced with my own composition.
This installation, “New Encounter on a Warm Day,” is my attempt to create a space out of the experience as it now exists in my mind, to examine the tension between memorializing a moment and imagining a reality, and to invite viewers to experience it for themselves. The installation consists of two parts: a projected video and a larger-than-life sculpture. The video is my narrative illustration of the encounter, animated with shadow puppets. This choice was inspired by Plato’s allegory of the Cave, where mysterious puppet masters provide a skewed education of the world through “the shadows of artificial things,” parading puppets through firy projections as if they were themselves direct reality. Similarly, in the process of self-constructed memory, I can identify myself as adopting the role of my own puppet master as I manipulate a real moment into a collection of more simply perceived, shadowed understandings. Given the restraints inherent in demonstrating a reality with paper puppets, I am attempting to evoke a sensory experience that is both familiarly evocative and apparent in its construction.
The sculptural portion plays with this process of memory reconstruction by exaggerating the image of the deer rib cage included in the video in both size and interactivity. My incessant relation of this image to the deer family encounter gives it an unidentified relevance and it persists as a strange and disjointed resident in my mind. Thus, I have reconstructed its partial form as I now understand it and have set it intruding upon the gallery space within which the video is projected, large enough for viewers to pass through. Its juxtaposition with the video may serve either as a confrontation amidst or a companion within the realm of illustrated reality in the attempt to grasp one’s own experiences.
For all I knew I was a trivial intrusion to the creatures, but regardless, this encounter bewildered me. I fixated on the memory of it. I began to draw connections between this experience and others, including in particular the memory of a bony deer carcass decaying in the woods. It was as if I had tapped into a bank of moments that bore similarly undisclosed significance and that longed to be set in a new context. Yet as I now reconstruct the event in my mind, I fear that I fabricate its original profundity. A distance grows in the relationship between the encounter and myself and I fumble with my memory, blurring or stretching details to fill holes in my interpretation. Without conscious intent, the authentic existence of the moment has been replaced with my own composition.
This installation, “New Encounter on a Warm Day,” is my attempt to create a space out of the experience as it now exists in my mind, to examine the tension between memorializing a moment and imagining a reality, and to invite viewers to experience it for themselves. The installation consists of two parts: a projected video and a larger-than-life sculpture. The video is my narrative illustration of the encounter, animated with shadow puppets. This choice was inspired by Plato’s allegory of the Cave, where mysterious puppet masters provide a skewed education of the world through “the shadows of artificial things,” parading puppets through firy projections as if they were themselves direct reality. Similarly, in the process of self-constructed memory, I can identify myself as adopting the role of my own puppet master as I manipulate a real moment into a collection of more simply perceived, shadowed understandings. Given the restraints inherent in demonstrating a reality with paper puppets, I am attempting to evoke a sensory experience that is both familiarly evocative and apparent in its construction.
The sculptural portion plays with this process of memory reconstruction by exaggerating the image of the deer rib cage included in the video in both size and interactivity. My incessant relation of this image to the deer family encounter gives it an unidentified relevance and it persists as a strange and disjointed resident in my mind. Thus, I have reconstructed its partial form as I now understand it and have set it intruding upon the gallery space within which the video is projected, large enough for viewers to pass through. Its juxtaposition with the video may serve either as a confrontation amidst or a companion within the realm of illustrated reality in the attempt to grasp one’s own experiences.