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Excerpt 2 minutes 23 seconds

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SODA LAKE​​​ UNBOUND

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2009/2022; 13 min

Video, still photography, and ambient sound design by Christina McPhee

 

Along the San Andreas Fault, on an alkaline playa called Soda Lake, a dancer ties and unties a pile of outsized transparencies. These are printed with images from the Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, a project on seismic memory in earthquake country. The dancer has been tasked with building a tent with only the available ties and ribbons attached.  The task is not possible to complete. As they collapse, the transparent prints gather alkaline dust, effectively, transient monotype recordings of the playa's surface. Field recorded sound accompanies this reverie of ordinary gestures of tying and untying to no ends except themselves.  The task loops;  possible metaphor of recurrence as a kind of perverse freedom.   Dancer: Melissa Spooner. ​Premiere: Christina McPhee: Regeneration at Kino Saito Art Center, Verplanck, New York, 2022.