Final Work Constructing Realities

With the ability to step further into my older work and pursuing it to a greater depth of the relationship I have/had with my estranged father. I wanted to begin in a place I hadn't accepted as producible to my previous piers and tutors, something that I recognised had more detrimental effect in the long term by "bottling them up" as my previous tutor had warned me, and to whom I complete disregarded not feeling it was appropriate to show the certain kind of people who thrive of off gossip and can't understand most difficulties in life. It was a privelidge to be educated where I was but also a complete isolating period of my life as I felt by most people, lost in translation when I expressed my actual thoughts. A lot of my life back then felt immaterial, illusory and idiosyncratic. I produced this series of work to reflect on the "masking" effect of what life has been like for the past 7 years. I still don't know who I am and honestly I find it easier to move through life as Kaz then I do as Spencer or Fuji. Once again unintentionally or maybe intentional subconsciously I dragged his attire to London, somewhere we hadn't been one of the reasons I wanted to come here in the first place, a reason to be anywhere else he hadn't laid his handprints on. I reduced this to nothing, both by bringing him with me in the fabric I now store in a grey wardrobe and in the fact I am now skinning myself to be like him.

Test shots 'Slipping Away'

'1000 Yard Stare' Kaz had one of those faces, if you caught him at the right moment you would see him, thinking he was looking at you, but instead right through you. Something about that 'look' became this early fixation. I'd try to mimic this look at the age of 8. Not that I would, but you could say I've been rehearsing for this role for my lifetime.

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Inspiration (above)

'Lasting Perspective'

Final Still 'In Transit'

With my final artwork for the project I created something that would make more of an homage to myself as narcissistic as that may be to a time where I was still holding in tension. I understand that I have his features, his chin, his eyes, his bone structure, there is no but... or although.. there will be no catharsis in this statement because there isn't any. I look like the man that manipulated everyone that entered his world, everyone who showed a morsel of interest or affection. A man who had brutalised and abused those who were connected to him by means of blood. Blood being something I was told by him was invaluable, a priceless commodity. Those who are your family are with you forever and in a sense he wasn't wrong. He doesn't occupy a physical space in my world, he persists in my psyche. And it was blood that influenced the next "Behaviour" the title of my experimental film involving the aftermath of what I had planned over and over in my head the day after The Event, the reason why I am here in the first place, the fuse. Bluntly I wanted to convey the inner turmoil, the face of my father a stone cold gaze and my own. the benefit of my own feature in this shot was that the splice isn't of two different frames where I'm posing with two different emotions. My face is split between looking furious and melancholy. If I wanted to read too much into it I'd say this was a physical effect of what doing this performance has on me. I find it quite funny.

Film Still 1 "Behaviour"

https://youtu.be/q6yIJNxd0Ag
YouTube link to full film "Behaviour."

Behaviour was made in context to what I would do had I been allowed to do what I had constructed in my mind. I had planned and thoroughly participated in this fantastic event within my imagination. The aftermath, as it were, wasn't anything short of honest. There wouldn't be this Travis Bickle level of applause from any societal perspective of sacrificing any element of my safety in a misinterpreted act of benevolence. Purely the revelling in a dreamt moment. I doubt any pursuit of the actual event would lead to anything but disappointment, a key point made by most murderers was the lacklustre outcome, no feeling of undescribable euphoria, just flooding of blunt and beige emotions.

Aftermath has yet to get any discernible dialogue in the film. In fact, all dialogue spoken by the character has been instrumentally redacted, utilising the sounds of the London underground tracks screeching against the wheels to make it indecipherable. I also wanted to follow suit with my other (in my opinion) more meaningful work, removing more relatable humanistic features for a more desired effect of discomfort. I pursued this by shadowing my eyes with my brows to black out the areas without much interference in post-production edits. I also went back over the footage to reduce frame size to accommodate this theme of removing the eyes of the subject to alienate the observer.

Objectively the footage encapsulates the simulated reaction of having just murdered Kaz. I spent 3 days planning the event in my head, even to the point where I began training my body to perform the representative action. For context, I have been able to locate my father's current apartment in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, after tracking him through several of his online accounts, including his business email. After all this time and his avoiding contact through moving from state to state in the U.S., I had finally found the man I had initially spent the last decade of my life terrified of, even leaving what I had once known as my home to escape him, now spending years looking for him. There was a moment when I spent hours staring at the screen, looking at his profile picture and seeing how much he had aged, something I didn't account for. I think it's something particular to survivors of domestic violence. There's a psychological element; the abuser stays with you as they were. Kind of like dying young. No one can remember what they were other than that, young. So comparing him to as he was old, grey, even weak was a shock. The man I had spent resenting had seemingly withered in the time I had finished getting ready. Like a soldier preparing for a great and violent war only to have himself delivered to the battlefield, only to find it deserted and the remaining opposition detached from the idea of a fight. This lustful excursion I had set myself up for had slipped through my fingers and into the rearview mirror. Now I find myself walking through these memories with spite for what I could've done in them, now seeing that any action now couldn't hold a candle to the triumph of acting and succeeding before.

In the end, time had beaten both of us, and I now found myself and all my effort into this idea redundant. Countless hours of planning are now just left to rot in a corner. I often revisit this corner to build this retrospective analysis of what I felt in this complex range of emotions and how I could build off it now as an artist. This is why I created the test film "Behaviour" I wanted to see what I would have been like subjectively using the most realistic available resources I had, conditioning my mind to back to a point in my life where I spent most of my time miserable with my living situation and angry with the inability to control any element of the direction my life was moving in.

At this moment, I've ended up going on this tangent, falling into each rabbit hole of how and why I wanted to... could've done... and so I end it here. In the future, I intend to follow this line of thought until it leads me to an escape or until I run out of material. So far, I see neither happening.

Constructing Realities This page is part of the collection 'Part 2 Photography & Time based Media'.

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