Alex Huddleston: last year forgot. the places
Beschreibung:
To what world will we be ancestors?
Perspective is a technical device in painting to reproduce the effect of a singular position of observation in three dimensional space, in which all geometrical formations coordinate to converge upon a single point on the horizon – the so-called ‘vanishing point’. But perspective is also that very singular position of observation as such, a unitary subject observing a unified field of existence. The use of perspective places a viewer into an orientation spatially and temporally, left, right, above, below, in front, behind, before, after, during; there is no perspective that is not also a forced perspective, forcing the viewer, but also the artist into its structure.
“next year forgot. the places” is a meditation on our connections to the environments we inhabit.
What happens, then, when two perspectives collide? When the shadow of one perspective becomes the illumination of another, what vortex of perspective-forcing orientations results? A portrait of the internal upheavals within the mind, the various conflicting drives and desires, a tumultuous mass of will. The unitary subject is obliterated or at least fractured across every axis.
It is a dreamscape that explores uncertainty and sudden change; Simultaneous layers create moments of restriction and expansion. It is a moving snapshot, both grounded and displaced.
A portrait of Buffalo, NY is also a portrait of just about any American city. How much violence and trauma is buried beneath the spectacle of a highway screaming across the sky? What was demolished to make room for its construction? What stories lurk behind the façade of a land without history?
To what world will we be ancestors?
How much earth would be excavated to reveal the true extent of the violence? How much would in turn be buried by this mass of the living earth?
What can’t be seen?
Glossolalia, speaking in tongues, non-linguistic verbalization, is a practice within evangelical christianity. Taking a verse from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, the ecstatic moment functions as a way to circumvent the imperfections of human speech and directly address oneself to God. If one’s language has been taken and lost, a replacement imposed, how can one articulate that loss without reproducing it? A glossolalic gloss on a glossolalia How do our interactions with our surroundings facilitate critical connection to ancestry?
The Cocteau Twins are perhaps the most famous dream-pop group. Their music consists of remarkably abstracted color splashes and flashes through a fuzzy glow, an uncertain haze, a dreamscape.
To what world will we be ancestors?
Biografie:
olivia ong evans (born 1996) is a self-taught american artist of hokkien indonesian and european ancestry and heritage, currently living in buffalo, new york. Her work explores themes of identity construction, migration, and connection to land. In her video art, she uses experimental, intuitive practices to create distorted visualizations that explore positionality.
Alex Huddleston (born 1989) is a composer currently based out of Buffalo, New York. His music seeks to occupy a liminal space in which serendipitous relationships emerge and collapse in a play of familiarity and otherness. Centered on themes of alienation, sorrow, anxiety, schizophrenia, and fear, while functioning through polyvocal durations, his work embodies a singular affect – there is too much and too little, it is too fast and too slow, it is elegant and awkward, it makes too much sense and makes no sense. Contradictions accumulate; all have the form of two yeses pointing outwards, rather than two nos pointing in.
Interpreten und Ort:
- Recorded from 2018 to 2020 on Erie, Southern Paiute, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Lenape, and Haudenosaunee land.
- Video recorded and edited by Olivia Ong Evans
- Music and sound editing by Alex Huddleston
