These video montages depict absurd inventions or impossible sculptures constructed with elements of the human form in everyday spaces. In these vignettes, I elevate the everyday to absurdity.
In this piece, I constructed impossible kinetic sculptures using functional everyday objects to perform highly nonfunctional, absurd movements. These sculptures cannot exist in real time and space, due to the limitations of the physical world. They are both funny and sad, thus a metaphor for so much of everyday life
This performative-video transforms human movements into digital bits/units that can be copied and pasted, dragged and dropped, rotated and manipulated to create kaleidoscopic patterns. In doing so, the piece explores how digital media uses replication to reconfigure a digitized single moving body into infinite animated mutations. At the same time, the quirky bodily movements reestablish a sense of human physicality in virtual digital space.
Artificially Constructed Nature: In this piece, the process of mowing lawns becomes a representation of a larger notion of artificially constructed “nature”. When we landscape our yard or urban areas, we direct or truncate the growth of grass and plants, transforming the organic into ordered constructions. In a sense, we artificially construct elements of a real living, organic species. In doing so, we might begin to question at what point our interventions into the growth patterns of natural species transforms the plants (grass, in this case) from “nature” to “artifice”.
Aerial Landscapes: Aerial photography and videography provide unfamiliar, awe-inspiring perspectives of the real world. The fact that we can simultaneously view the top of our house on Google Earth, while sitting inside our home looking at a computer screen, elicits a contradictory sense of space and time—we feel at once dwarfed (giving us a sense of humility) and omnipotent (giving us a sense of the sublime). These contradictory notions might prompt us to question how we can feel both at the same time. Which perception is real?
Unlike the awe-inspiring views of the earth from space or sublime photographs of the earth’s urban or rural areas, I capture the mundane activity of mowing one’s lawn. The birds-eye-view of the video (and the projection onto the ground) likens the human figures and their movements to that of ants, an illusion that is reinforced by the buzzing sound of the lawn-mowers. In doing so, I hope to elevate the commonplace, Sisyphean work of the everyman. Maybe I am suggesting the possibility that the quotidian can be sublime?
Digital Technology: Aerial imagery flattens 3D objects, transforming them from real places to visual constructions—2D blocks of color, line, and texture. In my piece, digital manipulation allows me to collage replications of the same video to push this illusion even further, making them coalesce to form larger patterns, or “greening” quilts. At a macroscopic view, these quilts appear to be ordered, morphing landscapes. At a microscopic view, each video shows the repetitive, banal process of suburban lawn-mowing. The interplay between the macroscopic and microscopic allows the viewer to alternate between experiencing each individual video as reality and then seeing the larger collage as a constructed reality. Digital video manipulation, in this piece, conflates realism and abstraction.
In this piece, I incessantly construct precarious structures using numerous cardboard boxes. In my failing attempts to create a stable foundation, I pile boxes to the point of collapse. When the assemblages succumb to their unstable fabrication, I begin rebuilding… over and over and over again. The incessant process, the instability of the structure, and the use of cardboard boxes work together to simulate the feeling of being «unsettled». The kaleidoscopic dynamism highlights the repetitious, frenetic nature of a perpetual feeling of instability. Not only does this piece suggest the feeling of instability in everyday life, but also in the current cultural context (architectural infrastructure in natural disasters (recent earthquake in Haiti) and the current national and global economic crisis). (This piece can be viewed playing on a monitor, projected onto a wall, or installed as a large pile of cardboard boxes onto which the video is be projected.)
This animation shows replicated performances of my sisyphean stacking and restacking a set of white blocks. Using animation, I digitally transformed human movements to create kaleidoscopic patterns. This work explores how digital media uses replication to reconfigure a digitized moving body into infinite animated mutations.
Sarah Buckius 