Take a Walk Around Oak Bluffs 2.0

In this black & white photograph [from stop 1], I saw the juxtaposition of two polarizing forces – the freezing ice against the warmth of the sun. I looked at the photograph, and asked myself “What do I feel?”  I wrote it down and looked again.  I used this knee-jerk repetitive process to try to capture and translate the elemental layers of ice, air, and fire in the photograph. I wanted to sonically represent the chill, to express what it might feel like to be a droplet of water freezing to that pane of glass. It would sound like a screech on a noteless violin I thought. Before the melody arrived, came the lyric “Ice on the sun” and with it a narrative in which I played two parts: that of a strong, heroic woman and an exhausted nearly extinguished man. Together these characters bear whiteness to this pane of glass and to this seemingly endless cold, dark night. But ahead, in the depth of the frozen blackness is the dawn, a star of hope that will guide them. No amount of ice can extinguish their love. I wanted the song to convey the threat of probable demise and the hopefulness of overcoming a seemingly desperate situation. The song is short and brief but compact, like its own little star, waiting to explode.

This song [from stop 2] was such a great messy, complex contradiction. It was this destructive and tortured lyric laid over this catchy great grove. I wanted to capture the song’s happy groovy accessible vibe mixed with its weird dark undercurrent. I don’t usually utilize literal interpretations but the visual of ice on the sun was just so unique that I felt it called out to be interpreted this way. My first images were of melting ice cubes on a sun that would run and melt and get messy. I put magnets in ice cubes testing for the perfect strength and danced the cubes across paintings filled with bold watercolors. As the film progresses, the sun moves across the sky. I wanted things to get messier throughout the film but then clear up in the end. To come back to a state of order, not cheerful but not maniacal either. My last frame pulls back to a visual of the universe, or outer space: structured, organized, calm.

The Film [from stop 3] told me a story of the relationship between raw materials and the way they are transformed into art. The video revealed the inherent beauty in both the raw as well as the manipulated materials and how they are never in a fixed state. One is always becoming the other.