Double Bewitched

1999, VHS/NTSC, 05:36

Double Bewitched began as a two monitor installation. It was one of a series of video installations that I produced during the years 1998 – 2001 using synchronized VCR’s (Listen, The Impossible Dream, Scratching the Surface). Each installation explored a different aspect of interaction between 2 images, and between the images and the viewer. The two monitors were placed facing each other. The focus of Double Bewitched is on the syntax of a contrapuntal narrative in time and space.

The images in this piece are personal at times, travel footage, diary – life recorded. Recorded moments, fragments of a life lived. Images from Africa and images from Canada are shot in a very similar manner, and it is often difficult to determine where ‘we’ are at any given moment. Images interact: there is a weaving together of terms and signifiers.

The voiceover and the rhythm of the piece speaks of a letting go of control, and at the same time a recognition that occupying this shifting terrain involves confronting fundamental issues to do with control (who makes these images?) and choice (what are the implications in choosing one term or an other?) The last section was shot by myself while driving my car, holding onto the camera with one hand and the wheel and gearshift with the other hand.

The subject position or voice within this work is not just de-centred and fragmented, it is in constant motion and flux, testing and blurring boundaries and definitions. In the movement of exchange and inter-relation, the relationship between things becomes absorbing: not the final, perfect, objective image, not the self or the other, but the movement between.