Film/Video

Spring 2008

"Dear Lori "

duration: 23 minutes and 58 seconds, color, sound.

Jessica Lynch narrated and played by Kay Copeland.

Click here to view clip (40.2 MB, Quicktime)

On March 23rd, 2003, the 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed near the town of Nasiriyah, Iraq. Eleven soldiers were killed and five were captured by Iraqi soldiers as prisoners. Among the POWs was a 19-year-old blonde hair blue eyed female soldier named Jessica Lynch from Palestine, West Virginia. Jessica’s rescue story quickly took center stage and her ordeal was used by the government to deflect negative attention away from the Iraq war. The Jessica Lynch incident ultimately extended beyond her persona to engage the nation in discussions of gender, race, war, and patriotism.

Sources ranging from her personal biography, internet images, and news articles were used to generate a fictional Jessica Lynch who engages in a philosophical meditation on war. Notes and images “collected” by Jessica becomes the basis of this self- reflexive video diary where she confronts her past and discusses her personal friendship with best friend Lori Piestewa. “Dear Lori” combines both original and found footage to explore personal and collective memory, the media, women in war, and the notion of nationhood.

Spring 2007

"Goodbye Horses"

duration: 1 minute and 50 seconds, color, sound.

Click here to view clip (3.3 MB, Quicktime)

The piece is a visual meditation on the physical body, and an exploration on the eroticization of violence.  The art historical theme of “Death and the Maiden” or “Kiss of Death” provided the inspiration for the imagery in the video. The theme “Kiss of Death” serves as a moral tale: life is short and so is the beauty of a woman.  Even though the maiden loses the battle, the struggle is often portrayed in an erotic manner. The title “Goodbye Horses” means letting go of the corporeal world, since horses symbolize the material senses.

(“Goodbye Horses” is intended to be shown along with “Push-ups”)

Screenings:

"Push-ups"

duration: 2 minutes and 5 seconds, color, sound.

Starring: Aldo Pisano

Click here to view clip (3.9 MB, Quicktime)

Military culture is obsessed with machines. For example, the military channel dedicates half of its programming to new technology and the latest weapons. In modern day technological warfare, machines become an extension of the body; turning the soldier’s body into a cyborg. Military calisthenics movements such as push-ups are mechanical in nature, but it becomes a seductive display for the viewer. Ideas of the male spectacle, autoeroticism, and necrophilia are investigated. Young people embrace the “romance” of war and soldiering, literally engaging in a dance with death. The military culture’s obsession with machines, with each push symbolically brings it closer toward its own destruction.

(“Push-ups” is intended to be shown along with “Goodbye Horses”)

Screenings:

"Tongue-tied"

duration: 2 minutes, color, sound.

Click here to view clip (3.8 MB, Quicktime)

“The ‘self’ or ‘me’, which is experienced on the one hand as more private, more essentially at the center, and on the other hand as participating across the bridge of the body in the world, is ‘embodied’ in the voice, in language. The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it” (49).

-The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry

The above quote served as one of the sources of inspiration for this piece. The idea that the self can be embodied and represented in the voice provided a lot of the visual imagery in the video. Notions of disembodiment, individual and national identity, power, seduction, and sacrifice are explored throughout the piece. This is perhaps the most politically overt video in comparison with my other work. 

Screenings:

 

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