MASKING
2024
Two channel video with 2.1 channel audio.
30:00
Sound design by Lewis Gittus.
Excerpt of video, install images, stills.
Masking deals with the unsustainable nature of anxiety. The work features two large, synced projections, each featuring the artist, made up in the manner of a theatrical clown. As the lights come up, I adopt the extreme expressions of the comedy and tragedy masks, which I attempt to maintain over a 30 minute duration. Across this time, my face begins to sag, twitch and drool with the effort of sustaining the emotional affect. Eventually, the two expressions begin to resemble each other, as shaky, gurning attempts at staying within the prescribed emotional states.
The work explores WJT Mitchell’s ideas around excessive description in a state of narrative freeze, which is, for me, a perfect metaphor for the explosion of pointless energy that accompanies anxiety.
In Masking, the effort of sitting in this state of temporal freeze becomes apparent. The title refers to the neurodivergent habit of suppressing true feelings or desires in social settings. The comedy and tragedy faces in the work become untenable, inflexible masks, each as unsustainable as the other.
The sound design for Masking uses a 2.1 channel score to extrapolate these ideas. The sound of ice cracking literalises the idea of narrative ‘freeze’, but across the 30 minutes of the work, the sound itself becomes unstable. It bloats, distorts, and eventually dissolves.