| Current / Upcoming Video Photographic Installation Writing Bio CV Steele CV Tomczak |
“before I wake…” a video trilogy by
Lisa Steele + Kim Tomczak
With this trilogy - still in production - we have returned to the interrogation of the body and lived experience as witnessed and indexed by the recording devices so prevalent in contemporary 21st century life. Once again, exposing our own bodies to the scrutiny of the camera, we return the camera’s gaze with questions, implied and overt: Does the digital remember better than analogue, better than film? Will you always awaken? Will I? How would I go on? How would you? |
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| Begun in our middle-age, this trilogy excoriates the idea of eternal youth. A wry meditation on aging and the body, each part focuses on another aspect of denial until denial is not possible any longer. | |
“Now if there is no consciousness
but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvelous gain.” (Socrates as told by Plato) "We’re Getting Younger All the Time”, a large-scale video projection, marks a return to the process-based video explorations of both of our beginnings with video in the mid-70s. This work began as a visual experiment and exists as a meditation and reflection on aging, a catalogue of the body and its sense of the ‘here and now’ as it proceeds to the ‘there and then’. This work evokes the past as it plays on the present, a hermeneutic on being here (now).
A second large-scale video projection, “Practicing Death”, radiates between faith and fear, palpably exploring the sense of trust that each one of any couple sinks into each night, as they lay down to sleep. “Well then,” said Socrates, “is there an opposite to living,
as sleep is opposite to waking?” “Certainly,” said Cebes. “What?” asked Socrates “Being dead.” These binaries reverberate through the subtle, dry, sand-like landscape of features as the relentless yet fleeting text slips by, a dialogue in dream-time. …this night…or the one before?
And the sleepers, almost drugged in their slumber, sleep on. Oblivious. No, this night. …you were afraid… The final installment, untitled (at this point)”, is a submersion into the unthinkable. Asked to consider the loss of the other, each of us was put into a hypnotic trance by a psychotherapist and guided down the stairs to a door that would open and behind which the other would no longer be present. The recorded sessions will form the basis for the final work in this trilogy. (We have 2 hours of video – with sound – of our hypnosis sessions. This material will be used to form the final “untitled” section of the Trilogy. The material needs to be transcribed before we will decide upon a final form for the 3rd part of the trilogy.) |
We're Getting Younger All The Time, 2001, video, colour, silent, 20:00 (3 min excerpt) Practicing Death, video, colour, silent, 3:13 (1:40 min excerpt) |