Motus Fort presents New York based sculptor Jen Durbin’s Tokyo debut.
Day for Night refers to the illusion of using filters during daytime filming to guide and bewilder the notion of reality and memory. Literature and drama ceded to movies the visual conceits and strategies of co-experience. The diversity of films and their multiple methods of fabrication blur attribution, and the separation of techniques from their analysis. This is the crack where our recognition of memory through live experience becomes malleable.
When directors use Day for Night, they are utilizing a means to achieve a desired effect, often because they lack the circumstances that permit Nighttime to be captured… as if the enigma eluded them. The effect is to feel an amazing blue moon hanging in the sky above them, an iridescence that surpasses our typical experience of the night… creating a stronger reality, a more real (intense?) memory.
My primary interest in hidden structures emerged from an early fascination with the narrative. Distant lands, bent time, intertwining narratives, I began to visualize time as a three-dimensional form. I was led to question how objects express time's complicated unfolding. Recollection, simultaneity, and prescience became juxtapositions in space while sub-conscious objects brought a new dimension to authenticity, and helped forge my belief in an object's ability to expand levels of consciousness beyond the symbolic and psychological. One object's end can become another's beginning.
In film, I was fascinated by the abstraction of filmic language and marveled at how the earliest film-makers worked out the inner physics of time passing on a flat surface: a black screen becomes a gulf of time, a dissolving image - a jump ahead in experience.
Beginning with Eadweard Muybridge's first motion-pictures of the running horse, capturing the widely debated impossibility of all four horse's feet leaving the ground simultaneously; it emerged, what a special place doubt holds in the experience of wonder. Elucidating how central story-lines of doubt and faith are to the rebirth of an image culture.
This for me mirrors my own process: to find what can achieve the effect, the belief. What the materials at hand hide behind their familiar veneer, and what is not only possible to fabricate, but what likewise can be the fabrication of possibility. A chair that spins, a can that reflects light, a fan that turns, I build from there - accepting that simple nature hides a complex reality.
Movie studios devise plethora devices to create effects and engage their audiences. Working in movie production, scenes are created to solicit empathy and familiarity with their audience. Techniques though are surprisingly oblique to the result. Entasis and anamorphs are among exaggerated visuals that become compressed into a more plausible reality. The mantle is exaggeratedly long to create the camera's effect of a slow pan and a split frame, but with the naked eye evokes anxiety and suspension. Set against the static existence of everyday life it evokes the anxiety of being and having a “normal enough” life with the right “props” at home. It perhaps implodes the magic of the imagination.
Joker is a behind the scenes filmic and pseudo-memory of a car turning the corner by using handmade Venetian-blinds and an oscillating fan with light bulbs attached. Mixed memories of fear, hope and wonder emerge, but what drives these, our actual experience or vicarious, supplanted visions created in a studio. It is this parallel where Jen Durbin sets out to explore and further distract before extracting our own interpretations.
Her exploration of the uncanny stumps us as we attempt to recall the placement of memory from her whiffs of tangible and visual video as they waft through our wending record of shared experience. Do these collective memories unite us as a species? What of our individuality or uniqueness when experiences can be so simply exploited and personally identifiable but on such a large scale that defies individuality? This transformation of visual story-telling into pure form restores that element of the everyday that gets most overlooked, the sense that visual memory and the emotions that join them are also present all around us, if our eyes are trained on what too often we forget to see.
