Don't Come Looking For Me

“Don’t Come Looking for Me” is a response to Vice’s “Aokigahara-Suicide Forest” documentary.  The forest itself has become a tourist site for those looking to commit suicide because of overwhelming social and cultural pressures.  An attempt to internalize and better understand such strong emotions, our work deals with over stimulation in a confined and restricted space- similar to the island of Japan and its dense population.  The title “Don’t Come Looking for Me” quotes a defining moment in the video, implicating, in the consideration of suicide there is a human desire to communicate.

Influenced by Stan Brakhage, Akira Kurosawa, Vice, and Robert Rauschenberg. The use of installation, painting, and video is an experiment in how to meld multiple medias, philosophies, and dialogues. The installation within the gallery space and extending to the hallway represents the forest and the individuals who are uncertain of their future.  Tape is left behind as a way to lead them out of the woods, or for the viewer to seek after them. The water bottles reflect vessels discarded by society, and act to distort the projection of video.

As a way to reclaim the abandoned, the use of trash bags, used pizza boxes, and newspapers all act as a surface to paint on. Imagery of tomatoes embodies the forgotten memories of our contemporary lives.  The synthetic harvesting of tomatoes year after year is a symbol for the cyclic nature of reality. 

Projecting video on the paintings creates a unique matrix of light that heightens the sense of over stimulation.  Through the video the paintings are reincarnated into living paint, no longer static. What we filmed was from our everyday lives.  Elements of nature such as water, air, fire, and earth are all represented. Life is present and absent in the bodies of insects. Moving away from the city evokes a sense of introversion. The possibility of an afterlife is together simultaneously in images of caves and clouds. Repetition and movement respond to overexertion in the attempt to stay relevant.

More photos to come...