Searchlights, HD Video Installation with Sound, Dimensions Variable, 2018
Searchlights [2018]
Searchlights reach with uncomfortable certainty through a two-way mirror.
Taking the process of interviews as a starting point, Searchlights explores the boundaries of labour, administration and bureaucracy that we place around ourselves through the ritual actions of three figures: examiner, subject, administrator. Using the language and aesthetics of observation, 3 short narratives built around the spaces and mechanisms of transition explore feelings of uncertainty as the relationships between self, context and environment are redefined.
The narrative jumps from vivid descriptions of spaces and past events to interrogative questions and precise instructions, occupying a constant state of flux between subjective first and third person perspectives and impersonal, one-sided dialogues. While the characters of an examiner, an administrator and a subject position themselves in space, enacting repetitive, ritual actions such as folding clothes, anxiously re-reading papers in a chair and making a bed, the viewer becomes a voyeur, silently intruding on their uncomfortable exploration of the environment from the corner of the room, the end of the corridor or what appears to be a prison door hatch.
Taking the process of interviews as a starting point, Searchlights explores the boundaries of labour, administration and bureaucracy that we place around ourselves through the ritual actions of three figures: examiner, subject, administrator. Using the language and aesthetics of observation, 3 short narratives built around the spaces and mechanisms of transition explore feelings of uncertainty as the relationships between self, context and environment are redefined.
The narrative jumps from vivid descriptions of spaces and past events to interrogative questions and precise instructions, occupying a constant state of flux between subjective first and third person perspectives and impersonal, one-sided dialogues. While the characters of an examiner, an administrator and a subject position themselves in space, enacting repetitive, ritual actions such as folding clothes, anxiously re-reading papers in a chair and making a bed, the viewer becomes a voyeur, silently intruding on their uncomfortable exploration of the environment from the corner of the room, the end of the corridor or what appears to be a prison door hatch.
Left: Searchlights [video still], Centre: Searchlights [installation view], Right: Searchlights [video still]