BEFORE  I  TURN  YOU  INTO  THE  CRAZY  STUPID  STICKY  MESS.  STICKY MESS LOVE  / from Into the Darkness Series /5′ 25″ min single channel video projection / 2016

/ In the video projections from Into the Darkness Series slide film materials are scanned mechanically overlapping each other, layer by layer, until the image is almost gone. What before was a linearly formatted story, where each still horizontally follows one another, became a Vertical Story / Vertical Movie with each still stacked on top of each other.

Figurative elements are slowly squeezed out of each still and eventually turn into a dark abstraction. Photo-transparencies are loosing parts of their original story adhesion so the meanings, like the memory itself deteriorates over time. Although as well as in our memory those “dark” areas are not just a blank/black spots. As we witnessed the transformation from figurative to abstract, we know that images are there; that’s what actually makes those areas dark — it’s being full of images/memories.

The Series evokes the famous “Proustian moment”, the madeleine cookie effect described by Marcel Proust’s in his Remembrance of Things Past. The layered image become visual evidence of the moment not just what is perceived, but also how and what is remembered. It is a symbolic reflection of repeated and constant links between perception and memory with its fragmentation / blank spaces /thresholds, its forgotten and coming back to life moments. 

 

STICKY MESS LOVE uses documentation of a Bubble Gum Contest. My interest lays mostly in not what we see but in what we don’t see — what left in folds and wrinkles. Overlapping images of  teenagers blowing bubbles are turning into the Francis-Bacon-like-mess of a first kiss, first love, first fusion of one into another and first slurs of a feelings, like a video title itself which can not decide how to be called — “before i turn you into the crazy stupid sticky mess. sticky mess love.” Combination of the words from Henry Purcell soundtrack “forever ever” with big pink innocent gum bubble delivers oppositional meanings — what on Earth could be more temporal than a bubble / what on Earth could be more temporal/ eternal than a first kiss.