Culte is a high definition, two-channel video projected onto adjacent right-angled walls. The product of an eight-month period of time-lapse photography, it uses architectural and plant imagery to conflate ideas of mysticism and the concrete, of illusion and devotion.
Initially the viewer observes a tangle of dead plants that reabsorb their fluids and return to life. As the video develops the plants appear to grow and shrink and ultimately ‘un-grow’, burying themselves back into the soil from which they once emerged. As the un-growth occurs, the forest clears to reveal an architectural fantasy: a model building made out of photographs of European Gothic cathedral architecture. However, this is not a normal cathedral of Christianity, but a sports stadium complete with an evergreen artificial playing surface. As the jungle of plants changes and simplifies we hear them rustle and slurp, while simultaneously the dual-purpose architecture is characterized by the passionate fervor of imagined events: sounds of religious and sports chanting and singing. These sounds represent the harmony brought about by such activities, but also the devotion or fanaticism elicited by these communities and their followers.
Culte is the French word for worship, but like the English word cult and cultivate it derives from the Latin word cultus, meaning to have been cultivated, nurtured, or figuratively to have been honored or worshipped. The combination of these meanings brings together ideas of both material and ideological promotion: our lives often revolve around such contradictory choices and preconditions. The video represents the contrasts and similarities between the mysticism of the natural world and the comparative devotion of a shared belief, whether it is in God or a team, or the community that those institutions encourage. Of course, the human race is reliant on the ability to feed itself, so the video can ultimately be read as a satirical representation of plant worship; referencing recent Western semi-religious movements like locavorism, bioregionalism, and the organic food movement.
This video is made up of several thousand images that the artist photographed at the Lowes Motor Speedway, in Concord North Carolina. They document the 2007 Bank of America 500 NASCAR race. Shown as a split-screen video, the images are comprised of a series of shots taken directly over the start finish line (approximately two stills per lap), and a selection of other views and details that describe the action of the 10 hour event in approximately 6 minutes. The soundtrack to the video is appropriated from the chariot race in the 1959 epic movie – Ben-Hur. The audio footage has been reassembled to fit and complement this similarly grueling modern day race.
NASCAR is one of the most popular sports in America, but it is also one of the most politically, environmentally and socially divisive in terms of its audience. This video forms an ironic dialogue between a modern day social and sporting gathering, the Roman version of 2000 years before us at the Circus Maximus, and the grand illusions and dissimulation of the Hollywood epic. It highlights the entrenched political divisions that exist in America today, and reaffirms the imperial understanding that the manipulation of the people by those in political or financial power is especially effective in the form of entertainment.Metropolis is a quirky and very abridged narrative history of the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It uses stop motion video animation to physically manipulate aerial still images of the city (both real and fictional), creating a landscape in constant motion. Starting around 1755 on a Native American trading path, the viewer is presented with the building of the first house in Charlotte. From there we see the town develop through the historic dismissal of the English, to the prosperity made by the discovery of gold and the subsequent roots of the building of the multitude of churches that the city is famous for. Now the landscape turns white with cotton, and the modern city is ‘born’, with a more detailed re-creation of the economic boom and surprising architectural transformation that has occurred in the past 20 years.
Charlotte is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, primarily due to the influx of the banking community, resulting in an unusually fast architectural and population expansion. However, this new downtown Metropolis is therefore subject to the whim of the market and the interest of the giant corporations that choose to do business there. Made entirely from images printed on paper, the animation literally represents this sped up urban planners dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today. Ultimately the video continues the city development into an imagined hubristic future, of more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas and into a bleak environmental future. It is an extreme representation of the already serious water shortages that face many expanding American cities today; but this is less a warning, as much as a statement of our paper thin significance no matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build.
This animated stop-motion video was made in direct response to social and political arguments over the construction of new sports stadiums, both in the US and UK. Though inspired by the somewhat ill-conceived plan to build a new JETS football arena on the west side of Manhattan, this video refers more directly to the English game of football, creating a brief, absurd history of the evolvement of the stadium from playing surface to ‘Babel-esque’ monstrosity. It is a satire of the need for bigger and bigger stages of any popular type of theatre at the expense of everything else. However it conflates the greed and absurdity of the issues with the thrill of the game and the epic religiosity associated with it.