Barbara White

Gather/Shed/Lift (2008)

Gather / Shed / Lift is a trilogy of films created collaboratively by visual artist Alison Crocetta and composer Barbara White. All three films are scored for flute, viola, harp and percussion; the music may be performed live, or it may be presented on DVD in a single channel video installation. In preparing the trilogy, the artists have joined forces with the performing ensemble janus, who intend both to perform the music live and to collaborate with the artists on the recording project. Using Super 8 film, Crocetta records her own body in live performance, situated in outdoor spaces that use the site as an envelope for a specific action. Her filmed process of moving, collecting, and releasing both found and made objects within the site presents an open narrative about the human experience within an ever-changing environment. Each performance presents a repetitive action. For example, Lift begins with a view of a frenetically moving field of balloons that are tethered to the ground. The performance consists of Crocetta attaching each one, in turn, to her head, creating an improbable, peculiar, and absurd bouquet. The visual character is striking, for Crocetta embraces the black-and-white palette and grain of the original film. By filming at an altered frame rate and using prominent jump cuts, Crocetta introduces a clearly fractured sense of time, revealing that a moving image is comprised not of seamless motion but instead of a succession of still images. The music plays with time as well. Crocetta’s flickering film, with its obvious edits, encouraged White to emphasize rather than smooth over the film’s discontinuities. As a result, in the real time of the live performance, as the musicians play in tandem with the film, the viewer is reminded of the fragmented time of Crocetta’s original performance. This film trilogy is a meditation on the substantiality and evanescence of our bodies, the spaces they inhabit and the objects they encounter within the human construct of time.