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Quality Time with the Family
YOU ARE LISTENING TO OWEN ERIC WOOD TALK ABOUT
HIS VIDEO INSTALLATION "QUALITY TIME WITH THE FAMILY"
ARTIST STATEMENT
While I was in Italy exhibiting my installation Quality Time with the Family, I discussed my work with Francesca Franco, an art historian who had a theory about the theme of escapism in terms of my project. Since Italian is her mother tongue, I later took the time to write down the following for her since she said her written English is better than her verbal skills.
My original intent behind my video installation Quality Time with the Family is to create an experience for the viewers that causes in them an emotional response and psychological state that are similar to the way I have felt when I am eating dinner with my family.
The emotional response includes feelings of loneliness, isolation and alienation; and the psychological state is one of frustration, confusion and sadness in respect to a situation that should be a time when my family becomes stronger, strengthening the bonds between us through conversation, familiar gestures and physical intimacy. However, I have felt the opposite. Although we are together, the bonds between us feel artificial. Conversations seem like one-way monologues; we talk but we do not listen. My mother will ask a general question about my life but soon after I start speaking, her mind is somewhere else. It is as if she feels that asking the question is enough, that she does not feel she needs to listen to the answer. My father has always been a quiet person. He internalizes everything. He lives inside his head. The behaviour of my parents is copied by their children, so what should be quality time with the family is not quality time at all.
Like the title of the project, many of the elements are also ironic. The videos, the table setting, my performance and the arrangement of the electrical cords and equipment are all used in ways to create a paradox or double meanings that contradict each other. I do this to construct a tension between what something is trying to be, and what that thing actually is. This can also be said to be a comparison between what is an accurate depiction of reality, and what is an artificial construction or emotional interpretation of that reality. SImply said, all of the elements of the project recreate a life-sized model of the event of my family eating dinner but none of the elements can truly recreate the real experience; they are always doomed to fail. However, the inadequacies of the visual elements mimic the inadequacies of the human relationships that are depicted.
The videos of each of my family members are two-dimensional, short clips that represent only fractures of time. Even if the dialogue was not cut out, the videos are recorded moments so they could not ever talk to each other, and they certainly could not interact with me while I do the live performance. Furthermore, to emphasize that these videos are merely fractures of time, each video has been edited in a unique way. the editing is subtle so it does not distract from the overall impact of the project. The clips of my mother, for example, run backwards to comment on how the actions we do when we eat are a type of loop. Chewing, drinking, even laughing are the same backwards and forwards. The clips of my younger brother are cut short and rapidly repeated to point out the monotony of the action, while the clips of my older brother are sped up when he was eating slowly and slowed down when he was eating quickly to make his movements more consistent, more mechanical like an automated machine. the videos of my father and sister were edited in relationship with sound*. For my father, I simply cut out all the sound except when he speaks the short phrase "a long time." I wanted to make a satirical comment about how my father barely speaks by giving him the only voice at the table. Although the phrase was his response to an unrelated question, "a long time" directly relates to the element of time in many aspects of the project. My sister's video is edited so that the background noise is only heard when she is chewing her food, which is a playful way to point out how all members of my family have been silenced by the technology (and by me), and that both the background noise recorded in the kitchen as well as the physical equipment involved in the installation are overwhelming them. Although they clearly represent the figures in my family - mother, father, two brothers, sister - their personalities have been taken away to cause one of the paradoxes in the experience; I offer the viewers the opportunity to observe my family, but the experience I offer is highly manipulated so the viewers cannot learn anything about my family members as individuals. But again, this reflects the overall irony of the project.
(*Note that for Visionaria, all the audio was placed on one track coming from two speakers so the relationships between image and sound are not exactly as they are described here.)
The table setting and my live presence are also an obvious artificial construction. Plates and glasses are laid out for people that the viewers know are never going to come, and I sit and eat with people who I know are not there. But it is not important that the experience achieves reality. What is important is that I create a futile action that continues despite the fact that I know it is futile. More importantly, that I create an experience that viewers believe despite the fact that they know it is not real. I feel that the majority of the responsibility for achieving this lies in my performance. It is important that I remain committed and focused on my immediate environment and ignore the viewers who are watching me, in fact act as if they do not exist, which I realize can create negative feelings of alienation among them but this if part of the point - they they feel detached from me despite the fact that I am right in front of them, sharing the same space. The goal is that I become a living sculpture, not a living person but merely an animated object among the other physical materials in the installation. Or, the viewers could start to read my presence as though they are watching a recorded video of me instead of me being actually there. In any case, the theme of disconnection is meant to be expressed through my lack of interaction with the viewers.
This theme of disconnection is physically represented with the placement of the electrical cords on the table. The entire installation is obviously an artificial construction, a futile illusion that nobody will believe is a true representation of the people in my family, so I feel no need to hide the equipment that is used to create the illusion. In fact, I use the cables as a metaphor to represent the irony of communications technology. Although televisions, cell phones, text messaging and the Internet are meant as aides to help us connect with each other, they do not replace (in fact, cannot replace) the connections that occur during physical human interaction. The irony here is that although all of the electrical cables are connecting the equipment and therefore allow all of the video and audio elements to come together, the wires are placed in a tangled mess all over the table, taking over the human activity that should occur in that space. Although I am grateful for the technology that enables me to do my art work, especially in the case of video, I am apprehensive about it taking over my life by disconnecting me from the physical world, by substituting real experiences and interactions with virtual ones that are mediated by some form of mechanical device. Most importantly, I worry that I am losing time (and essentially my life) because much of what I do and what I see is experienced through a monitor. I feel a loss of humanity - that in Canadian and American life especially, television and more recently the Internet are interfering with our ability to relate to each other as human beings because people are not using communications technology as merely facilitators to communication but as the main means of communication, and in a real sense have replaced human interaction with an interaction that is mediated by technology. As a result, I feel the society in which I live is losing touch with values associated with family, friends, neighbourhoods or communities and other forms of human relationships.
I cannot speak for other places, but taking note of the fact that Italy has a culturally-instituted practice of stopping activity in the middle of the day and then again at night so that people can sit down together to enjoy long, relaxed meals tells me that thins are better in Italy (at least in this respect). In fact, I am very happy to present this project in Italy because I think it reasserts faith in traditional social values that countries like Italy preserve.
I think it is also important to point out that although Quality Time with the Family is essentially about a social problem, the act of creating the project and, in turn, exhibiting the project not only suggest a solution to the problem but also activate that solution. From the beginning, my family had to participate in the project, which engaged them in what I am doing in my life - my art. Although their engagement was limited, their willingness to be videotaped in itself is a symbol of our familial connections. Their knowledge of my acceptance into the Visionaria festival further engages them in discussion about the project and my art work in general (when they ask specific questions, and then follow-up questions, I know they are listening). In the case of my older brother, he was actively engaged in the creative process, asking questions (sometimes even telling me how I should do the project). He was the person who suggested the idea of videotaping the dogs, which I did and I added the extra monitor on the floor as a tribute to his participation and contribution to the project.
In terms of my own social development, creating this project has given me the ability to look at my family and more importantly myself as an outside observer. I could watch how my family members interact with each other and how I interact with them. I discovered that what I thought to be the reality of the situation was for the most part not the reality but only my perception of reality. There was more happening that my biological eyes didn't see, but that the video camera caught on tape. Technology can allow us to literally look back at a moment and see it from a different perspective, which is why I feel it is important in this project to make contradictory statements. By doing this, I acknowledge that there are ways of seeing things that are different from how I see them. In the project in particular, I purposely isolate myself from the audience to create a sense that much of the emotional content of the project (as well as the psychological content) is internalized, and perhaps I am the cause (or at least a major contributing factor) in the disconnection I feel with my family. Perhaps I need to change my behaviour and/or my perception in order to change reality.
Lastly, the act of exhibiting this installation and participating in the Visionaria festival is a key example of breaking out of the isolating and lonely process of making art to bring it into a social situation where the experience is no longer just my own but shared among a larger community. In itself, this breaks down much of the problematic social behaviour that this project critiques. So it is not just the art project itself that deals with the concepts, but the processes of creation and exhibition that extend the ideas and manifest them into changes I have made in my life, which is key in maintaining the genuine and personal nature of this project.
-Owen Eric Wood, Piombino, Italy, October 2009
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