“Lost & Found Innocence”
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Theme: Innocence is lost and found as part of the cycle of life. This is an evocative video about resistance and letting go, with metaphorical references to time, culture, place and positioning. Images and sounds of water, human struggle, trees, types of corridors and blue sphere shapes take the viewer in and out of overlapping personal and public spaces.
Inspiration: The poem I wrote below inspires this video. It is therefore positioned as a text in the first video frame, preceding the video’s title.
“At what time do we lose our innocence?
Or is it time itself that gradually erodes,
Breaks us down,
Flowing continuously over our bones?
“Stand still! I said.
Time did not.”
Treatment: The use of a video within a video, positioned in the upper left corner of the screen when facing, provides a bridging to the simultaneity of sounds and images happening on the rest of the screen. A performance-based video on multiple levels of time and space, the artist also captures herself climbing and rolling down two different types of hills. She records her performances by positioning the camera at the top of the Deifenbunker Hill in Carp Ontario (museum of the Cold War), and at the top of a smaller hill along the meandering Mississippi River in Ontario. The performance images are then collaged with home-films of her as a child taken by her father, her own recent home videos, and those of mass-media historical documentation footage.
Sound: The artist’s laboured breathing from a smaller frame in the screen, cross over and mix with those of water and media announcements from the collage of images that rhythmically flicker on the larger screen.
Format: DVD, VHS
Time: 5 minutes.
Date: ©2001
Distributor: V-tape http://www.vtape.org/