Narrative of Silence - 2013 - Nine channel video installation with sound

Narrative of Silence is a series of nine videos utilizing the intersection of cinema, photography, fiction, representation and the document in order to question the ways the silences and isolations in our lives spill over into sublimated violence.

Each video is a simple scene with a cinematic trope at its core. The videos are approached photographically; while there is motion and the hint of a narrative within each, they are not movies so much as photographs extended and stretched into time. The characters in each are portrayed not by professional actors, but by my family, they perform as themselves, awkwardly, under close scrutiny for extended periods of time, as the camera stares at them unblinkingly. They are pinned in a moment between the suspension of disbelief and its resurrection as the scenes hover between fictional representation and document. This ambivalence is echoed in the structure of the shots. In their calling attention to how they were filmed, the camera is referenced relentlessly, an omnipresent character in itself.

Quoting from cinema, these formal doubts and uncertainties play together across the 9 videos to create a subtle narrative invaded by by the silence of the figures interred under their characters. It is a story of silence, of lack of communication, of unspoken desires, and of a cruelty that never emerges, neither from the narrative or the representation that bears it. Narrative of Silence is a sequence of photographic videos haunted by ghosts of cinema and violence.