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| Portrait of Women
This video is in the editing stage.
It features a number of models, each of whom has done one or two 20 minute sittings. Each pose is broken into several-second intervals, resulting in a progression from model to model in a list that forms a collective portrait.
The full-length video will be long enough to essentially rewire the viewer's brain through an experience of looking that is similar in focus to the experience of being a painter's model (or to watching a long, abstract Michael Snow film).
The shot is a fairly tight close-up of the model's face. I sit directly to the left of a small camera, and the model and I gaze at one another for the entire session. In this sort of psychological experiment, an ordinary gaze transforms through various levels of interaction, attention and meditation. While it's different for each model, the attention between two people must change into something new as the normal interpersonal communication of a mutual gaze necessarily expires, leaving a personal communion with the self. The social act of looking at one another eventually becomes a meditative one, and many subtle transformations of expression are recorded.
Each model is a beautiful woman, who while being filmed is being looked at by a man (me). This is an essential psychological and art-historical reflection. Looking at a beautiful woman, in a way that is taken out of it's normal context, the viewer is presented with the paradox of the pleasure of beauty and the tension of both confrontation and his or her own limits of endurance.
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