Other Methods of Bearing Weight
‘Other Methods of Bearing Weight’ was filmed for two years following the death of a loved one, as a means of creating a language for connection and intimacy to endure once they no longer had a body. The project approached death not as a loss, but as a transformation into something unknown and unexpected. I began this work on 16mm because of its unique capacity to allow me to perform directly with erasure. I was able to acknowledge my relationship with their not-body visually, by replacing the figure of my co-performer with a body of light via scratching them out of the print, frame by frame. My artwork is informed by my shifting landscape of relationships with loved ones, alive and lost, and often occupies the space between tangible and intangible – the transition from the world I occupy to behind the screen.
‘Other Methods’ acknowledges the ways that connections to all the ones we love remain with us ephemerally by taking a sensory approach to conveying intention and intimacy. It constructs a collaborative language for significance by repeatedly converging on symbols of memory, meaning-making, play, care, and reverence. It repurposes tangible performances as attempts to create immaterial ritual spaces for them to fill, referencing artifacts of their former vernacular, and uses the visualized metaphor of on-screen absence to invoke the space with me that their removal takes up. The limitations of this intent are acknowledged in their certain failure to return them to us, at the same time that they form into something different, recontextualized, anew.
16mm film edit in progress with digitally edited sound, shot on a Bolex SBM with the help of Aidan Spann, Kirsty Hambrick, Sandy Bullen, David Fathers, Kieu-Anh Truong, Skaila Pyatt, Natalie Richard, Kilynne Higgins, Anais Perez, Zelikha Shoja, Marie Pascual, Michael Zuhorski, Toni, Samantha Kerr, Rose, Mika Daniel, and Joshua Leonard. Special thanks to Alpha Newberry, Emily Vey Duke, Cooper Battersby and Linda Moses.
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