'SUB-'

This video installation, a 3 by 2.5m film projection, provides us with a view to an escalator in an endless downward movement. The cold, self-reflecting strips light slides towards us over the stairs, and betrays a downward movement. In this symmetrical image only the metal of the escalator stairs can be seen: no actors, no props. It takes us a while to understand this continuous movement, even if though its presence is clear. This is because the filmed steps stay at the same place in the frame. Gradually the rhythmically sliding light, and details like the moving faces of the stairs, betrays the camera’s position on the stairs themselves, taking us down as the audience. By frontally projecting this image on wall it is abstracted from our normal point-of-view. The perceptively concurring lines of the stairway make it seem like some kind of tower, an enigmatically moving object. The swaying game of light reflections generates a hypnotic experience, similar to staring at an endlessly rocking sea. The title ‘Sub-’ or ‘Under-’, a word in need of an ending, can not only be understood as a downward movement (e.g. sub-terrain), but also be completed to form words like sub-jetted, under-go, under-way, sub-cutaneous (or under the skin), and maybe most of all, sub-conscious.

This work has been digitised in the frame of DCA Project