I Morti

Year: 2002
Duration: Five 60 min video loops
Excerpt: 4:00 min

The work is a suite of five video projections, which form a meditation on mortality, photography and the nature of represented experience. The central image of I MORTI is a series of shots of headstone photographs from a cemetery in Tuscany. In this projection, which entirely fills one wall of the gallery, the mute faces of the dead stare across the space, each slowly brightening and then fading to black. Across the room are four smaller image streams, each showing different scenes of "diary footage"-- images of everyday life and travel. I found the photographs on the gravestones very intriguing. I started to consider the weight these images carry, how a single picture comes to represent, in some ways, the entire experience of that person. I began thinking about the ways in which most cinematic experiences are also "representations" of something else. I wondered if it would be possible to shoot in a manner that was more direct, so that the viewer would have an experience of seeing something through my eyes rather than seeing an action "represented". Collected over four years during travel across the US and Europe, I MORTI is the result. The work has been shown at Art Resource Transfer Gallery in New York and the Aronoff Center for the Arts, Cincinnati.

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