Four Films on Memory and Place

An obsessive, repetitive gesture: hands turning, picking, and pulling the shrink-wrap off of a VHS copy of the 1994 Gen X hallmark Reality Bites against a plain blue screen backdrop. Over the course of this ten- minute undressing, the artist mimics the excitement of teenage fandom, reciting in cool detail the film’s plotline, character types, cast, and current market value of the outmoded VHS. It’s clear, this VHS is more than the object a teen’s pop-culture fetish and fascination. Rather, the unopened Reality Bites VHS represents, for the narrator, a line to be crossed. The transgressive act is the narrator making plans to unwrap and watch the film – an act that will alter the value of the object as a still sealed, original, unblemished, and authentic copy to a tampered with, used, and ultimately not collectable VHS edition.

Dancing in the Absence of Pain is comprised of home videos shot by the artist’s grandfather, Franklin Pigatt. Following Pigatt’s passing in 2018, artist Terence Price II edited some of this footage, capturing decades of social and family history as seen by his grandfather. Squarely within the genre of home video,
Price’s film documents everyday family life, highlighting relationships between moments of familial joy
and love and broader cultural histories that exist outside the bounds of the domestic sphere and that
inform the social bonds that create community.

Using childish speculations as a lens onto longstanding geopolitical dramas, The Craft draws on Monira al
Qadiri’s upbringing in Kuwait in the late 1980s and early 1990s to ask: “Were my parents conspiring with
aliens behind my back?” Employing childish drawings and home video footage, the artist unpacks this
central question to probe soft power structures and consider the science fictive qualities of oil futures,
war, and waning empires.

In Deborah Statman’s Energy Country, images of the frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry,
and the religious right are woven together with scenes depicting the petrochemical landscapes of
Southeast Texas. The film interrogates how land use policy serves the global oil and energy industry and
highlights ideological linkages between nationalism, foreign aggression, and fundamentalism.