SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEO PROJECTION - ACT I of III
& INSTALLATION (OBJECTS + WORKS ON PAPER)
2023

Pierrot in the Air Horn is a project composed in three discrete acts that deals with the ancient notion of the vital breath and the production of utterance.

Act I: Wind Tunnel, 2023 is a single channel, blue tinted black and white video projection that charts the journey into the imagined space of an air horn. The camera tracks down a conical horn-like space, capturing the mimetic actions of our mute guide and surrogate Pierrot, a 3/4 life-size puppet made out of firewood, as the wind from the air horns’ blast animates a series of kinetic sculptures made from studio scraps and common objects. Pierrot in the Air Horn is a meditation on (non)human subjectivity and mechanic animism. The only humans featured in Act I are the puppeteers, visible but shrouded entirely in black in the manner of Japanese Bunraku theater, tasked solely with animating the wooden puppet Pierrot. Per the title, the structure is modeled after an airhorn, an object that is both a clown's noisemaker and signal of alarm. There is no language, only the mechanical analogue for voice; compressed air through a diaphragm. The camera, and Pierrot, push against the wind and into the belly of this device where the human takes a back seat to inert materials that eternally animate.