Lot, 2012, three channel video, TRT: 6:42 looped, filmed in Queens, NY
Exhibited at El Museo Del Barrio for the exhibition Superreal: Alternative Realities in Photography and New Media, curated by Rocio Aranda-Alvarado
LOT comprises a series of three sequences made by attaching a wearable camera to various parts of my body while traversing an abandoned lot with three different movements : the camera attached to my head while crawling, my ankle while walking, and dragging from a rope that was tied to my waist while also crawling. The three sequences were assembled in one frame as a single channel video. The exercises resulted in a video of destabilized time-based images, where the horizon jumps around the frame, blurring, eventually becoming lost altogether. The project was shot in an abandoned lot in Queens where weeds were overgrown, a graffitied wall was the horizon, and the sky was filled with the tops of skyscrapers. The video questions the perspectival hierarchy of the human body, specifically the head, in its dominant point of view in the creation of imagery from the illusory space of painting to its representation in photography and video. Hito Steyerl, in her analysis of the influx of verticle images in contemporary media, states, “And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has dominated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity” (p170, On Horizon).
The three sequences obliterate the horizon and replace it with:
1. The ground
2. A chaotic frame where ground and horizon shift erratically
3. A fragmented view of a foot walking on gravel through overgrown weeds