Wash

     Below is a link to newest product of my experimentation with a video process I have been exploring in relation to my interest with memory and the human experience of temporality.

     The act of washing has roots in the religious, cleansing of the spirit. Given my considerations for the nature of the self, and how we identify with ourselves in time present, and past through memory; the video appears to be dissolving the image of the self as formal portraiture, with each consecutive wash transforming the original form. In this very way I find correlations between this video and the video works of Bill Viola, in specific the piece as described by the artist below. Using the process of washing as imagery to present a change in state.

     Where on one hand, above, I have proposed that the process is a reduction in form, there is room to consider that the repetition creates an accumulation rather then a reduction. Though this is contradictory to the nature of the video process I feel it does offer an insight to the works gravitas. 

     As the process repeats it can be seen, that like Bruce Nauman's 'Art Make-Up' (above), in appearance an application of colour to the work. Though in process I know this not to be the case, as the only stimulus that exists within the video is the initial image frame, with no further external reference, only motion remains; all of the colour distortion that occurs is essentially a reduction from the source image colours. That being said I do believe that within the works concept there is a form of accumulation that can be brought into question, the accumulation of obscurity; as the act regresses from its original form of conception, its moment of origin; entropy begins corroding the form. The building ambiguity of the work culminates at the videos end, as the portrait becomes evermore ethereal.

     I  want to conclude that this deformation through process is my intention to suggest our inability to ever truly experience the past as it happened in the then present. Eckhart Tolle's claims on this are of great influence to me, referencing 'The power of now'. There is a certain irony that arrises in the this debate between the notion of the self and our memories of ourself. I am proposing in duality, that whilst the past offer use such ambiguity  we simultaneously draw the egoic self from that same place. In a sense this video is a proposition of our fallibility, of the fundamentally flawed uncertainty of any definite understanding of the self drawn from the past. I suggest that regardless of our re-imaginings, our memories live through us in the present regardless. The only way to truly view the self is in the mirror of consciousness in the now.