A split screen experimental surreal journey into three simultaneous visual narratives that explore death, transformation and memory.
The long-awaited epic cinematic triumph about death and transformation from the artist Alyssa Taylor Wendt uses three simultaneous narratives to hypnotize the viewer with visual mashups of non-linear experimental imagery. In production for five years, amid her other exhibitions, this trio of productions presents as a 37-minute split screen single channel film, as you are seeing it here. The cinematic construct demands the viewer's attention, with dark imagery and layered elaborate sound design that speak to mortality, ruin, memory, cycles of history and song, the origins of truth and the spiritual energy of objects. Filmed as three separate productions in Croatia, Detroit and Austin, the artist used tropes of improvisation, narrative memoir, abstract landscape, performance, experimental film and opera to provoke questions about narrative and time while stimulating our symbiotic relationship to visual symbols. The Croatia segment used the brutalist spomenik monuments to provide a controversial background for various performances all relating to controversy, cycles of history, shame, fear and magic. The second channel used Detroit as a stand-in for post WW2 Berlin, illustrating various folktales that my father told about surviving in Germany at the end of WW2. The central channel has also been shown as an experimental feature of the same name. The final segment was filmed in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, using a cyclical notion of time to illustrate how we imbue objects with energy and what that means for our sense of history and memory. This complete project is a labor of love and a brilliant crossover between film and the visual arts and has been extremely well received thus far.
