EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Adam Hurwitz
My current work is a series of looping, non-narrative, computer- generated videos about the texture and melancholy of memory. Though specific in time and place, the pieces are intended to convey the broader universal phenomena of memory and contemplation. The unsentimental recollections are recreated from the ground up with computer animation software, imparting an uncanny, dreamlike quality to the simulacrum of a remembered world. The resulting videos are informed by my experience as a painter and exist in a world between painting and film. They represent an ongoing project entitled Reflective Nostalgia, after a term described in Svetlana Boym’s book The Future of Nostalgia: “Reflective nostalgia thrives in ‘algia’, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming — wistfully, ironically, desperately.” This body of work is about the moments between moments, the interstices of life when nothing seems to happen. “June Bug”, for example conveys the experience of being alone in a room where the only motion is a beetle ricocheting around the interior of a lampshade while gnats swirl endlessly around the base of the lamp. The sound of a dinner party coming from the other side of the door heightens the sense of dislocation and isolation. The project is ideally experienced as an installation, using video monitors and wall projections. The videos are played simultaneously and continuously. Soundtracks, digitally collaged from my own ambient field recordings, are heard without headphones so that sounds bleed and blend between videos to create an immersive experience.
