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S.O.S. Project Probes Man’s Struggle for Meaning; 

Inspired by the UFO Mythos, Armageddon Evangelism and Small Town Parades. 

 

Installation Views of Soon...Our Salvation at HallSpace July 2010

 

Thoughts About the Project

This series of drawings, video and wall drawing begun late in 2008 is concerned with creating an iconography of desire…the desire for meaning…the desire for totality…the search for salvation.  I am fascinated by the persistence and pervasiveness of UFO iconography in American culture.  The UFO myth, credible or not, is a rich example of our species search for purpose and meaning and something wholly other, or “holy” other.  UFO mythology viewed as an outgrowth of the inadequacies of religion and science to quench modern man’s innate longing for meaning of life and self.  I am intrigued by the genesis of the UFO phenomenon and its symbology, a symbology rooted in primitive archetypes projected by the collective unconscious yearning for wholeness and totality of the self. 

S.O.S. Suite (six part video work, total run-time approx. 19 min.)

Soon…Our Salvation is a six-part ontological epic created in its own universe of recursive context. The piece inspired by the UFO mythos combines oblique references to sci-fi and home movies with scavenged source material.  The work’s low-fi, low-tech aesthetic pushes the grain and grit of the source material overloading the pixels and juicing up the distortion.  Editing technology provides the capability to color outside of the lines and treat the video like construction paper cut with blunt scissors, collaged with mucilage, and bespangled with sequins for added pizzazz. 

As the work progressed to its six-part form, the intertwined elements of sex, religion, and war became an integral subject of the lens focused on this most human of desires-the desire for meaning.  Source footage is gleaned from the sum of ten years of video surveillance of our world.  Small town parades, a bird’s eye view of the constructed world, natural phenomena, television evangelists, mountaintop removal mining in the Appalachians; these are some of the sources from which this work was built.  The scenes of mountaintop removal coal mining at Kayford Mt., West Virginia are particularly emblematic of the human condition for me.  Mountains have been held as sacred places to many peoples and religions throughout time.  Moses and Mohammed went to the mountaintop to speak to god, yet we tear our mountains down for coal to feed the ravenous god of consumption.  

We are searching for salvation

…from ourselves.

Soon...Our Salvation Part 1, "NightDream" on Vimeo.

 

Drawings from the S.O.S. Suite.