(19)
Untitled (with my father)
HD video, color, sound
20:31 min.
Video, 2020
Voice of Jack Marmorstein
With gratitude to Carolyn Lazard
Transcript
[Video opens to a black screen as dialogue begins. A flash of sun against a suburban neighborhood starts to play on the screen—a horizontal first-person view walking down the neighborhood street amidst cars, trees, and manicured front decks—the camera movement creates a slow swinging motion. We stop in front of a brown suburban home, white picket fence with white trim around the windows and doors. A series of close-ups of the building and neighborhood cut to an overview of a small wooden table littered with documents, hand-written letters, and photographs. A hand reaches out and begins to riffle through the pile, finding court documents, newspaper clippings—cut to more shots of a neighborhood: a playground with abandoned bucket and toys, the Open Center for Children, and back to the exterior of the house. The video continues, moving back and forth between footage of the neighborhood (a ginger cat, an intersection, a crosswalk) and documents (letters from the artist’s mother, family photographs, a book made by the artist as a child titled “Dead Dog,” a postcard of a delta plane mid-flight). The film then cuts to a view outside an airplane window, looking out at the bay just outside the Boston airport as it descends to the runway, ultimately cutting to black as the plane is taxi-ing.]