Fiona Larken: DeV and Kids
Title:
- DeV and Kids
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Medium:
- DeV: Super 8 (digital transfer) Kids:Super 8 (digital transfer) and video
Artist Statement:
‘…Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “ Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?”’ Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
In an increasingly peripatetic society there are few who haven’t shifted, uprooted, travelled. But how does this affect our attachment to place? Does increased movement offer a fractured experience of place? In response to this do we construct histories, places, fictions to fill the gaps? Do these fictions increase our longing and nostalgia?
Current work centres on Super 8 footage found amongst old family archives. The Super 8 offers a version of the past which is incomplete being that the context, the people and places are now speculative or forgotten. As our relationship to this past can only ever be abstract, fiction seems a fitting way to engage with this found footage. In supplementing the material with additional fictions, the Super 8 footage exceeds it’s own limits. This suggests a blurring of the distinction between past, present and place, between Super 8 and digital, between the still and moving image.
DeV: Amongst the found footage are brief glimpses of DeValera inspecting a parade. Walking away from the camera is the incomplete figure of a man who had a significant influence in reconstructing a notion of ‘Irishness’. Here, the past is mismatched with the present, our gaze is directed to the gaps and the difference between nostalgia and history.
Kids: Against an idylic backdrop children play fight, however, on repeated viewing it appears more brutal, then they begin to dance. The contrast is highlighted and the awkwardness of the performance replayed when the artist attempts to assert her presence through animation.
