The Wilderness / joy tirade
The Wilderness
The Wilderness (2017) by joy tirade. Single-channel video 4:03 minutes
“The Wilderness is a meditation on the relationship of place to human emotion. As we revisit a site, our standing memory becomes scripted with new memory, in this view a site can become a depository of stray feelings that accumulate but simultaneously dissipate.”
Can you tell me a little bit about how this film originated?
jt: This film, The Wilderness, is filmed in rural Virginia off Highway 85. This area of the country holds a lot of meaning for me. It’s like a time capsule. I moved to rural Virginia when I was a young person to live with my grandparents. Before then I had only lived in very large cities like Buffalo, NY. I remember my first impression of the region as being wild, lush, overgrown with trees and brush, and teaming with sounds and smells. Some places had old buildings overgrown with kudzu vines which appeared to pull apart old boards and return the buildings to the earth. The night sky was so bright with stars it would make me ache while I stared up at it. The noises of the region are loud with birds and cicadas. The air in the summer smells of that metallic screen-door smell you sense right before a storm. This is the place, this county, is the location where I came of age, where I first found love and also lost love. When I returned to this region almost a decade later I found the memories there waiting for me like in the soil, in the trees, in the foliage and the rain. The Wilderness, for me, contains all of these meditations.
Can you talk about the sound image relationship? I know that they were recorded at intentionally different times.
jt: This is a great question. In some of my other works I am using more than one channel of video and this allows me to open up the narrative to alternative constructions of narrative. I am interested in non linear time and telling stories that are snippets of stories which recur endlessly. Sound in The Wilderness is another way I am playing with the construct of time and narrative. I also experiment with in-camera alterations and play with ways of manipulating the light entering the camera.
I shoot with the camera on silent and for this film the sound is from a field recording made one year prior. For The Wilderness this creates a disconnect between actual time and perceived time. This is me trying to understand perception. How we can’t actually know space but can only experience it through our perception. Everything we experience is filtered and potentially altered by our faculties of perception. There is a slight timing disconnect with the sound and with the imagery at times. I think it is faintly disorienting too for the viewer.
You're trained as a painter. Your films have a very painterly feel to them with their attention to layering, texture, color. How does painting play a role, if any, in your video work?
jt: Great question! This relates to your above question about sound. In this work I am thinking about the material and textural qualities of sound and how these qualities relate to the meaning of the work. I think this urge comes from my background as a painter. If you use a material in contemporary painting like rose-water it carries a meaning. The medium cannot be separated from its material implications. So too sound from field recording made one year prior to the video has its own meaning. These are two discrete moments made to seem as one by the video. One thing this does for me is highlight our finite experience as humans in a geographical setting that is as old as time itself. I am thinking about this contrast of time and our place in time-space.
The layering of the images immediately evokes a sense of memory or even longing. Then there's a beautifully subtle moment where the image begins to transform into fluorescent hues. Can you tell me a little about these choices?
jt: I am interested in time’s relationship to the body and to memory. I am interested in the relationship between time and longing. I am interested in raising questions about knowledge and self knowledge. How we know what we know about ourselves or about the people we love. How is all of this complicated by technology. All of these considerations play out in my work in different ways.
I have been thinking lately about how slate forms in sheets under rivers and compounded by the slow march of time. How natural elements are formed by accumulation, pressure, and time. About how this kind of geological time is distinct from our more fragile human time. These layers build up year after year until they are transformed. I think of layering in this particular video as mimicking this natural process.
In the middle of the film, there is the introduction of a piece of cloth. Sequenced and majestic. The only article in the film that is not nature made. Because of this, for me, it carries the weight of a subject or the artifacts of a subject that is no longer present.
jt: In conversations with you, Colleen, I first learned of the work of Nathaniel Dorsky. I became very inspired by his work and I bought his book of lectures called Devotional Cinema. I am drawn to this quote by him for this video work. He writes: “In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.” In my video work I am trying to implicate the body without the use of the body.
In many of my works, especially the larger full-sized projections, the viewer is the one who begins to feel present in the space I am depicting. There are no actors and no visible human bodies present in my works. My videos implicate the body without having an actor, because I am trying to recreate a simulation of sensuality, the sense of being right there. I want the viewer to enter my feelings, or maybe even think that the work is about their own life. The imagery becomes like a dream or a memory for the viewer.
This film was made in 2017. Looking at it now, deep in Covid19 fear, does it have a new meaning for you?
jt: This film feels full of air, moving air, light and open space. I currently don’t feel safe in open air even in a mask due to the Covid-19 fears. The film doesn’t take on new meaning but viewing it again I do feel altered by our current situation. Perhaps I feel altered too by what I am viewing during Quarantine. I have been watching the show Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson. This has made me rethink this work a little bit too.
Thank you for the opportunity to interview with you! If the reader would like more information I can be reached through my website www.joytirade.com or through Instagram @joytirade
“My practice operates at the nexus of experimental video, abstract painting, light installation, and zine making. In my work and in my research I create connections between phenomenology, technology, and feminist theory to explore the metaphysics of human emotion such as love and longing. “
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
“SO EASY” Chicken and Swiss Casserole
Ok, I’m not promising any healthy recipes over here. If you’re gonna do the midwest casserole right, you’re gonna have to give up your quarantine diet for the night. Another gem from my mom’s church cookbook. Chris promises it’s “SO EASY”. Layer the midwest staples - meat, cheese, and canned soup. Search for sports reruns on TV. An hour later voila! Bon appetit!
From Mom’s Church Cookbook