So who was that woman reading by the window? It was Amanda Kerdahi Matt, one of my school mates at the Transart Institute - raised in Texas and living in Cairo and creating some delightful, engaging and profound video work.
Unsounded is eight minutes of clear, dreamlike imagery paired with sound that at first seems to be from the same moment. But as the scene changes it becomes clear that the conversation is not happening at the same time as the video being shot. Contrasts - the bread and butter of great work - emerge, as a strange musical note resolves into the sound of subway brakes - we hear a casual conversation between two friends on a subway that leaves the scene of a road trip to serve as the audio caption for a man taking a leisurely swim at the beach -- contrast as the soothing sound of water smooths over a nearly-empty subway car containing a forlorn two-year-old and his tantrum.
Unsounded / Cairo, Sinai 2010 from amandakerdahimatt on Vimeo.
What makes the piece work is the sparsity and clarity of the visual and audio choices. Managed so crisply, each thing standing alone is a visual or audio landscape that we can appreciate. The juxtapositions confuse the sense of time and space, and ball up the sequence of events so that we are no longer in a continuum-- we are in a dream space, the part of us that is thinking one thing and experiencing another, or the way we reminisce long after a vacation or outing has ended.
I did a lot of traveling this year. I have spent five out of the past twelve months somewhere else - four of those overseas. I have visited six countries around the globe and have seen some of the world's great cities, including Cairo, one of the subjects of the piece. (And seeing Kerdahi Matt's video reminds me how much I want to go back there . . . soon.)
What that level of mobility did was move the furniture around in my head to a pretty significant degree. I often find myself wishing to visit a park or cafe that is halfway around the globe, forgetting for a moment where I am. Visiting a new city, I find I refer it to many others - Cagliari is very much its own city, but wandering its center I was all the same reminded of Cairo . . Alexandria . . . Paris . . . New Orleans . . . Hawaii . . . Houston . . . New Mexico . . . bits and pieces of other places kept dropping into the present moment, overlaying it. Sometimes a memory comes up out of hand in the middle of a day - nothing reminded me of it - there is no reason. But driving down the road to Chicago sometimes all I can think about is a certain day in New York or the way a certain chilly summer morning felt in Berlin, a sparkling and rain-washed hour.
I treasure this kind of fragmentation - there are no sure anchors of reference in my physical experience and they are becoming less weighty all the time as my range of experience expands. There is not an ontological yardstick anymore - things are no longer "like home" or "not like home" -- there is in fact no home -- everything contains bits of everything else and I begin to feel at least partly at ease everywhere.
Kerdahi Matt's work primarily evokes that wonderful feeling - the memory of holiday, of place, as it sneakily and blessedly intrudes at times on our waking life and as we can sometimes remember more than one thing at a time. The work speaks to life richly lived and richly seen.
The visual peace and tranquility holds trump in the sensibilities driving the piece - this is fully realized and crystallized image and sound communicating unhindered. As I am a painter, I feel sympathies with Rene Magritte, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and Johannes Verneer - there is yet lushness in these lines that is brought courtesy of a diamond light.
Kerdahi Matt's work can be seen on Vimeo here.
Unsounded is eight minutes of clear, dreamlike imagery paired with sound that at first seems to be from the same moment. But as the scene changes it becomes clear that the conversation is not happening at the same time as the video being shot. Contrasts - the bread and butter of great work - emerge, as a strange musical note resolves into the sound of subway brakes - we hear a casual conversation between two friends on a subway that leaves the scene of a road trip to serve as the audio caption for a man taking a leisurely swim at the beach -- contrast as the soothing sound of water smooths over a nearly-empty subway car containing a forlorn two-year-old and his tantrum.
Unsounded / Cairo, Sinai 2010 from amandakerdahimatt on Vimeo.
What makes the piece work is the sparsity and clarity of the visual and audio choices. Managed so crisply, each thing standing alone is a visual or audio landscape that we can appreciate. The juxtapositions confuse the sense of time and space, and ball up the sequence of events so that we are no longer in a continuum-- we are in a dream space, the part of us that is thinking one thing and experiencing another, or the way we reminisce long after a vacation or outing has ended.
I did a lot of traveling this year. I have spent five out of the past twelve months somewhere else - four of those overseas. I have visited six countries around the globe and have seen some of the world's great cities, including Cairo, one of the subjects of the piece. (And seeing Kerdahi Matt's video reminds me how much I want to go back there . . . soon.)
What that level of mobility did was move the furniture around in my head to a pretty significant degree. I often find myself wishing to visit a park or cafe that is halfway around the globe, forgetting for a moment where I am. Visiting a new city, I find I refer it to many others - Cagliari is very much its own city, but wandering its center I was all the same reminded of Cairo . . Alexandria . . . Paris . . . New Orleans . . . Hawaii . . . Houston . . . New Mexico . . . bits and pieces of other places kept dropping into the present moment, overlaying it. Sometimes a memory comes up out of hand in the middle of a day - nothing reminded me of it - there is no reason. But driving down the road to Chicago sometimes all I can think about is a certain day in New York or the way a certain chilly summer morning felt in Berlin, a sparkling and rain-washed hour.
I treasure this kind of fragmentation - there are no sure anchors of reference in my physical experience and they are becoming less weighty all the time as my range of experience expands. There is not an ontological yardstick anymore - things are no longer "like home" or "not like home" -- there is in fact no home -- everything contains bits of everything else and I begin to feel at least partly at ease everywhere.
Kerdahi Matt's work primarily evokes that wonderful feeling - the memory of holiday, of place, as it sneakily and blessedly intrudes at times on our waking life and as we can sometimes remember more than one thing at a time. The work speaks to life richly lived and richly seen.
The visual peace and tranquility holds trump in the sensibilities driving the piece - this is fully realized and crystallized image and sound communicating unhindered. As I am a painter, I feel sympathies with Rene Magritte, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and Johannes Verneer - there is yet lushness in these lines that is brought courtesy of a diamond light.
Kerdahi Matt's work can be seen on Vimeo here.
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