77(8) Birhtdays, Killing Foor Trailer

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“77(8) Birthdays, Killing Floor” is a video concerning mental health and self-destructive behaviors cut against a memorial to ancestors past as vigil candles are both extinguished and come alight from darkness as life force is withdrawn into lungs once full of hope that now exhale despair. The work is a meditation on the impulses of isolation, depression, self-inflicted wounds, and submerges itself into that state of being, rather than trying to swim in its causes, potential prevention and prescribed solutions. “77(8) Birthdays, Killing Floor” illuminates the prevalence of mental health issues today and in the past, the tacit acknowledgment of suffering and isolation from family, friends and neighbors and some of the causal behaviors and conditions that increase the odds of a life shortened by gestures of self-release and relief. The piece centers on the juxtaposition of three visual elements: the extinguishment of 77 vigil lights, 8mm film footage shot by the artist’s grandfather in New Orleans between 1953-58 and extracted archival footage from George Stoney’s 1962 film “The Cry for Help,” made in association with the Louisiana Mental Health Association. A broken, non-linear narrative drawn from Stoney’s staged documentary institutional film provides a connective tissue between the vernacular family film footage and the lighting and extinguishment of votive candles, a gesture which serves to interpret a common Catholic memorial gesture. Here, however, the gesture is focused on the extinguishment of the candles, using lungs filled with smoke, alluding to self-destructive behaviors and the cancerous hold of addiction. Intercut around these performative gestures are vernacular family archives, peppered rhythmically into the edit as a contrasting, discomforting accent and subtext to the detached solitude present in the candle-filled frames. “77(8) Birthdays, Killing Floor” represents the most recent chapter of a fifteen-year series of short form experimental video works concerning domestic rituals, archival interventions, intergenerational communication emerging from the cultural geographies of post-Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf South.

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