M Gallery, CICA Museum
May 31 – June 4, 2023
2023.05.31 – 06.04
When the Seeds Say Enough
When the Seeds Say Enough is an open letter to the artist’s late brother as well as an active act of collaboration with his brother’s poetry. This eulogy’s thematic centerpiece is the remains of the artist and his brother’s childhood home as preserved in their shared personal archive. By employing alternative photographic processes, this work draws attention to the meaning invested in antiquated technology and visual language, as well as its role in our conception of videographic memory.
The advent of home video, by way of the relatively accessible Super 8 cartridge, represents a shift from video as a tool solely for commercial industry to a means for families to preserve memory and serve as a personal archive of places, people, and moments which have passed. The left channel of the diptych, hand-developed in caffenol, invokes lived experience, whereas the right channel, culled from home videos, is a visual representation of videographic memory. These visual effects are achieved through mordançage, a kind of vigorous chemical stripping of the delicate emulsion of the physical celluloid, and the creation of a cyanotype, a traditional photographic archival process which produces blue pigment, of the Super 8 film. The resulting imagery, both in contrast and in synergy, gives When the Seeds Say Enough a unique visual language to express the process of remembering and self-preservation in the wake of personal grief.
Dominick Rivers is an experimental filmmaker and musician based in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. By integrating technically outdated forms, he uses video work, framed by larger installations, to examine the popular media used to capture and sentimentalize memory. His research is focused on developing eco-friendly substitutions to alternative photographic processes that can be implemented with motion picture film. These substitutions demonstrate that commonly accepted techniques can be made more accessible and environmentally sustainable while remaining emotionally exigent.
www.dominickrivers.com
