Perverse Surface.
8:41. Digital Video. 2010.The project At Least there's an Avant Garde, You and I, (2009-10) was shot on the Galápagos islands and in the Galápagos landscape, itself a site permeated by romanticized 'natural' space, the constant flux of eco-tourism, the unlikely birthplace of post-Enlightenment science, and a topography that stubbornly resists such idealizations. In this multifaceted work I take on the persona of the isolated artist, working as an 'island,' creating a fragmented picture reminiscent of modernist accounts of the artist and his practice. Using video, text, and photography, I write "letters" back to a "home" that seems to exist in an indeterminate state of pre- or post- revolution. I see these "letters" as machinic devices use to ironize both the aesthetics and politics of the island encounter.
One digital video produced from this research has taken the form of a travel diary, echoing Melville's essay form. In this digital video, Perverse Surface (2009/2011, 8:40 min), shown in the University of Florida Harn Museum, and screened in Chicago at Nightingale Gallery, I trace the route of another travel writer - Herman Melville - through the Galápagos. In voice-over, a man reads a series of letters to his daughters, lovers, and friends; anachronistic shifts within the letters and the film-imagery suggest alternately the story of an exiled political essayist, a naturalist, a travel writer in the midst of a trip, or an early 20th century polemical artist.
Much like language, landscapes insist that they are continuous, seamless, and whole; my work has attempted to inscribe landscape, or place, as an interval, extending the seemingly singular "encounter" in multiple directions and temporalities. Throughout my work, I am interested in extending this specific geographic/historical moment into an exploration of modernist aesthetics and strategies, specifically through the use of the fragmented narrative of the lone artist ‒ the individual “writing from an island.” This singular figure is often contrasted in my work with current mythologies about collectivity and participation.
Perverse Surface from Wes Kline on Vimeo.
Ruins (At Least there's an avant-garde, you and I), (2009-10)
Ruins was photographed on the Galápagos islands and in the Galápagos landscape, a site permeated by romanticized 'natural' space, the constant flux of eco-tourism, the unlikely birthplace of post- Enlightenment science, and a topography that stubbornly resists such idealizations.
In this multifaceted work I take on the persona of the isolated artist, working as an 'island,' creating a fragmented picture reminiscent of modernist accounts of the artist and his practice. Using video, text, and photography, I write "letters" back to a "home" that seems to exist in an indeterminate state of pre- or post- revolution. I see these "letters" as machinic devices use to ironize both the aesthetics and politics of the island encounter.
The following are photographs from the project.
