Other Methods of Bearing Weight
2020
8:19
Hand-scratched 16mm film, hand-processed super8 film, digitized footage, sound.

Death as a reflex has always been unavoidable as an aspect of creating record-based work, which constantly dates itself and is lost to memory, erected repeatedly without its initial substance of happening. ‘Other Methods of Bearing Weight’ is explorative, ongoing visual research in response to overwhelming grief, the problem of absence as it pertains to creating visual documents, and the ceremonial study of continuing a relationship without the fundamental site of the body of the other. It utilizes the tangible film base of polyester to stitch together a record of performances and communal displays of care without distinguishable temporalities, repeating collaborative attempts at meeting at no descriptive location, a brightly lit entrance, reincarnating into digitized archives, reactivating behind the reflective surface and feigning perpetuity. It focuses on relationships as translucent sensory cooperations and ubiquitized liminal spaces, and on the invincible relativity of intimacy between two, something symbiotic and yielding captured without seeing, experimenting at togetherness.

Following the process of grieving, the necessity for the video medium to expand into the practice of mediumship manifests as attempts at methods of touching without the body, lifting without bearing, partnership free of the ridges and boundaries of physicality. My visible presence as the performer places me within the sensations I associate with those not present as ritual, references the unwieldy reality of physical substance and weight as a barrier to desperately trying to reach beyond the limits of the tangible, attempts to create a void for those I have lost to fill up. My experiences of love and devotion exist outside of the physical, and my work takes up the space in between that is not one. We collaborate on beauty as a location for constant prayer, on material as the jumping-off-point for disembodiment and a place to reference feeling. We meet each other as shades behind the screen. We envision performed metaphors for intimacy as a language for sustaining. We lose our selves and come back.

First screened with the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Color film shot on a Bolex SBM by Ellery Bryan, Aidan Spann, Kieu-Anh Truong, Marie Pascual, Kirsty Hambrick and David Fathers.
Performances by Ellery Bryan, Aidan Spann, Samantha Kerr, Kilynne Higgins, Anais Perez, Zelikha Shoja, Marie Pascual, Skaila Pyatt, David Fathers, Dottie Bullen, Rose, and Joshua Leonard.
Music played by Ellery Bryan.
Sound edited by Ellery Bryan.
Special thanks to Michael Zuhorski, Linda Moses, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby.