Blind Man's Bluff (2002)
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Single Channel Video, 01:58
A performance of a dream sequence is projected upon a head in front of a movie screen. The action takes place in Los Angeles on Beverly Boulevard that is adjacent to a building with a mirror surface. The performance is videotaped in the reflection of this building sometimes cutting to the real street scene. The constructed narrative concerns a blind man walking down the street and his uncovering of the diabolic clown under the happy clown’s costume, a truth which only the blind man can know. Crippled vision becomes thereby a metaphor for the creative self who investigates alternative paradigms outside that of the institutional notion of visible truth. The flow of the video from the screen to the skull to that of the screen again concerns the notion of the mutated observer. That in fact the brain and the mind are sculpted more effectively by artificial stimuli.
Blanqui's Cosmology (1997-2007)
Blanqui’s Cosmology exhibition, Trolley Gallery, London, 2007
B&W silver prints, Each: 16×20″
Louis-Auguste Blanqui was a famous 19th-century political activist who was jailed innumerable times for his views. In one of his incarcerations he wrote a cosmology of revolution which forms the basis of the title of this work. This work consists of over 1200 portraits I took of men and some women with shaved heads over the past 10 years. This work investigates the early roots of a modern subject. The photos are long exposure photos and document a performance in which i draw on the head of my subjects with a pen light. What results is a work that concerns not only the beginning of photography, drawing with light, but also the history of portraiture, eugenics, phrenology, spirit photography, electricity, the unconscious, x-rays, astronomy photography and hysteria.
