video > I Feel As If She May Be Vanishing

I Feel As If She May Be Vanishing, II is a culmination of video vignettes that voyage into the dark underbelly of womanhood. Viewers step into a sensory environment filled with visceral imagery amplified by immersive sound. Through a three-channel projection, they move through simultaneously unfolding scenes—the buzz of a beehive, hands tugging at lush hair, pomegranates cracking open, the blue expanse of water, a mouth gasping for breath, golden particles floating in a black void.

Using deliberately seductive yet disquieting imagery, I lure the viewer to grapple with the tension between moments of emergence and submergence, liberation and suffocation, struggle and surrender. For instance, the pairing of pomegranates—a symbol of fertility, with the cascade of long hair—a symbol of femininity, evokes the transition between girlhood and womanhood. The almost violent breaking of the fruit alongside the persistent pulls at the luscious hair, stir up both anxiety brought on by this change, as well as the autonomy over it. The bright red of the juice forebodes blood, yet vibrates with life, and contrasts the calm blue that is to come.

Each image contains an underlying reference to girlhood, femininity, womanhood, and birth. I film fragments of sustained gestures which act as metaphors, and give expression to raw emotions of personal experiences and passed down experiences of my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. These visual metaphors translate emotions instigated by our stories. The shrouded blue figure emerging from the water evokes a sense of ominous loss, yet simultaneously a calm that teeters between surrender and resolve—emotions imagined from the story of my great-grandmother’s drowning.

Using symbols, gestures and landscape, and formal tools of repetition, duration and fragmentation, I take the viewer on a journey that builds up to a crescendo, dotted with moments of release. It is a journey into the psychology of a woman breaking out of a fractured body, regaining fullness after re-examining personal history and tradition.