THE MODERN HORROR PROJECT
28:45 min, Single-channel digital video, 2022
Juxtaposing personal loss, spiritual transcendence, and political recalcitrance, The Modern Horror Project delves into the limit (or possibility) of emancipation today. The project culminates in a lecture performed in drag (as my mother, based on a studio photograph of her), and documented with a Hi8 camcorder that I borrowed from CalArts while I studied there. For my thesis, I merged the thought of Sylvia Wynter and Jean-François Lyotard, who both reinterpreted the radical liberation movements of the 1960s, while finding the cracks in humanist discourse in separate (and I’d argue related) ways. Centered within my multimedia installation Look Upon Your Work Mother, this project investigates how language and representation shape our reality, and asks how freedom is achievable within the enduring enclosures of “modern life.”
