HD VIDEO, single-channel, color, sound, 00:17:00 (2016)

   

 

    

Originally conceived as a silent video loop, “Self-Portrait with Mother, circa 1976-1945” served as the centerpiece of the multi-media installation, Portrait: (Auto-)Biography of a Way of Seeing. In both its silent and sound versions, the video ponders the ineffability of filial bonds, the inscrutability of loss and memory, and the mutable if not dubious nature of the portrait as an aesthetic mode. An Orphic musing on an orphaned medium, rising from somewhere beneath the fault between inherited analog archives and our omnipresent, sui generis, digital self-fashionings. Produced in conjunction with an artist residency at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, CA, this work also formed part of a solo screening at Reid Hall, Columbia Global Center, Paris, France.

© G. D. Cohen, all rights reserved