À Travers les Yeuz d'Une Femme
(2010)
makers: Elly Crofts, Gina Liu and Rosie Holden.
A classy opening credit sequence, discrete white text on black, lets the text just float in the whole browser window. Similarly the "Made in Korsakow" credit and the creators names are also quiet, tucked away in the lower right corner to be there, but not needing to be loud (large) since it will be ther all the time. The title translates as "Through the Eyes of a Woman", and while I'm not sure why it is in French, the project is an attempt to catalogue, informally and in the vernacular, a series of observational asides that are not only relevant to the daily experience of a young woman, but also hoping to express, aesthetically, what what might thought of as a 'feminine écriture'.
The work uses four thumbnails, and has descriptive words associated with each video sequence. These are simple, producing a list rather than a description or an argument. As I select a guitar I seem to be in a cluster of music related clips - piano, iPods, a saxophone, with a pair of rings appearing as a clip that appears to join or link outwards ot other clusters. One of these other clouds, or constellations, appears to be a series of clips of personal jewelry - I knoow it is personal because it is shown being worn, or at home - and each is in close up, as if there is an effort to associate the piece with memories that are not available to us, but must be there (much like a snapshot) simply because the thing has been filmed with at least some care. This is part of the feminine écriture mentioned, the work eschews establishing shots or explanations and presents what are in effect imagined to be intimate artefacts as just that. Why they matter is not important, just that they do.
The material that has been collected seems to have been curated, via keywords, into a set around music, another around family and friends, words/writing/reading/keyboards, what I'd call 'between' which are clips of waiting and sleeping on public transport, and another that might intersect these or could itself be either pattern, or indeed just orange since this seems to be the dominant hue here.
In terms of concept and presentation this is well realised. The material sometimes becomes jejune, even mawkish, and is a good example of an excellent idea that needed another major cycle of critique and reflection, but its ambitions are worth admiring.