Rebecca Carter

fremder_fremder

fremder_fremder, 2009

collaboration with Emily Carter

video in digital frame, wood relief furniture, stuffed owls with notions, groundless thread drawing, photograph

Combining low tech animation processes and live video, fremder_fremder explores the inevitability of becoming stranger within the most intimately family(iar).   Drawing inspiration from eclectic sources including Russell Hoban’s sci-fi narrative Fremder – the story of the un-mothered self flickering in and out of being – and Bracha Ettinger’s theory of aesthetic relations with the stranger through the matrixial borderspace, friend_friend combines family history and grand historical narrative to build an abstract meditation.

The installation is sparse and restrained.  On the far wall a bas-relief set of twin beds and table float in a one point perspectival drawing/sculpture.  Faint pencil lines on the wall complete the bedroom furniture extending into an imagined space.  The lines quiver with the awkwardness of a beginner.  Above the bas-relief table, at the vanishing point of the drawing, a 4 minute video loops in a 10” digital picture frame.  Against an abstract sound scape, the video shifts between low-tech animations of planes, boats, animals and a disjointed text message conversation.  Directly opposite the video two owls garbed in red and gold perch on a leafless branch emerging from the wall.  On a third wall a groundless thread drawing in cursive text reads “who who.”