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The title word shares latin roots with lasso, lace and noose suggesting connections between the violence, but also elegance of capture on the one hand, and the seductive surface of lace decoration that obscures and reveals. Culture, whether of roping or lace-making, has deeply ambivalent instinctual roots. The video is inspired by roping practice, but performed by a man and a woman in an empty 50's suburban living room, thus provoking questions about the wild and the tame, the authentic and inauthentic, and the problem of romance, described by Novalis as the search for the infinite in the finite. The work takes place in a liminal zone that is neither documentary nor conventionally fictional, but references John Huston's 1961 film, The Misfits, in which Marilyn Monroe plays a recently divorced woman interacting with a trio of broken cowboys in the business of capturing and selling wild mustangs. Cameras were placed on the bodies of the subjects, taking the eye out of the position of control and power and giving us instead a kinetic record of events with additional movement and texture. The lashing, looping, tightening, swaying, tugging of the rope becomes a language full of ambiguities and a range of emotion from preditory or submissive instincts to aesthetic sensibility to play to compassion.
The title word shares latin roots with lasso, lace and noose suggesting connections between the violence, but also elegance of capture on the one hand, and the seductive surface of lace decoration that obscures and reveals. Culture, whether of roping or lace-making, has deeply ambivalent instinctual roots. The video is inspired by roping practice, but performed by a man and a woman in an empty 50's suburban living room, thus provoking questions about the wild and the tame, the authentic and inauthentic, and the problem of romance, described by Novalis as the search for the infinite in the finite. The work takes place in a liminal zone that is neither documentary nor conventionally fictional, but references John Huston's 1961 film, The Misfits, in which Marilyn Monroe plays a recently divorced woman interacting with a trio of broken cowboys in the business of capturing and selling wild mustangs. Cameras were placed on the bodies of the subjects, taking the eye out of the position of control and power and giving us instead a kinetic record of events with additional movement and texture. The lashing, looping, tightening, swaying, tugging of the rope becomes a language full of ambiguities and a range of emotion from preditory or submissive instincts to aesthetic sensibility to play to compassion.