I-so-late
My work deals with isolation, and the feeling of being in a place with little interaction. I started by checking out the CNN news at different time intervals for the past months. As I film the news in real time, there were instances where the news trailed of into subject matters that were just as important as the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of those subject matters included how the government was handling the crisis, the change in people’s attitude, looking at different ideologies to see who is right and wrong. From this exchange, not only do I video the events on T.V., I also visit a University campus that use to be active. As I work on this video project, it becomes more of a documentation on real life events.
Taking inspiration from Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who works on large scale photographs about the manufactured landscapes, I-so-late is a video project that follows the current Covid-19 pandemic that is happening in the world. Ever since the virus started in China, it has made its way across different countries, including North America. This virus has caused major setbacks around the world, including high unemployment rate, business schedule changes, and social distancing. Plus, the death rates are at an all-time high and everything that was physical has become virtual. This working project is created to highlight the changes that are going on in the world, and the idea is to use a University campus that was once full of people.
The intention of this project was to document a current event that has brought the world to a standstill. This project brings forth an issue that can happen again at any time, and how it should be taken seriously and not passed off as a minimal issue that can be solved within a week. Not only that, but the intention of this work is to see how people feel when they see other perspectives aside from their own.
Pandemic, Covid-19, Social Distancing, Stand-Still
Mindless Wonder
Experimenting with video and sound art allows me to combine two elements that are treated as separate subjects. The ambient sounds in each sound composition helps move the sequence of events along in each working project. As I work with video and create soundscapes for my projects, realization kicks in that there is no limit to adding your own spin to your photography.
Taking inspiration from Xiaolu Guo, a Chinese-born British filmmaker who explores memory, personal journeys, and Luis Bunuel, a Spanish Mexican filmmaker during the surrealist movement, Mindless Wonder is a video narrative the follows a dream sequence of the subject when they are asleep. Since dreams are either made up of fantasy elements that never happened or memories of recent events, like eating an apple that morning and remembering it, there are endless possibilities as to what a person can dream of. In this video, it is a narrative without a narrative. The random events that are going on in the subject’s mind are not meant to follow a sequence of events or have a story within the dream. Instead, there are acts the subject is doing with no reason behind them.
The intention of this video project is to highlight my thought process when a person is unconscious. When a person experiences dreams, they are a fantasy of the creator’s own imagination, without any story or order of events.
Dreams, Unconsciousness, Sleep