Blink and Boring

Emily Budd
"Blink and Boring
Movement 1: Blink (with Jean Dry Lake Tinguely Site) 8:14
Movement 2: Boring (with Dry Lake Valley North Solar Energy Zone) 5:12"
2020-2023
Video, sound, projection
Courtesy the artist

Artist statement:

These videos combine documentation collected using old iPhones in selfie mode, placed at the surface of the earth. It sees from the ground up, capturing a mirrored reflection of its location. It lies at the place where underground entities of the past would emerge into the above-ground present, where memories emerge and look towards the future, where seeds sprout and take root. The camera looks up at pieces of trash discarded in the desert, revealing a world-altering viewpoint from the roots of native and invasive plants, including observations of wildflowers blooming near Lake Mead in April of 2020 during my first outing after the pandemic shutdown. These slow observations are combined with site responses inspired by Jean Tinguely’s "Study for an End of the World #2," at Jean Dry Lake and Dry Lake Valley North Solar Energy Zone near Las Vegas, Nevada. Like Tinguely’s “happening” it also suggests a time machine, exaggerating deep-time imagining and rebuilding after chaos and destruction. A counter-response to the disastrous explosions of Tinguely’s apocalyptic production, this work observes the end of the world as a slower and more gradual presence. I am interested in a small and object-oriented point of perspective to suggest an indefinite length of time for which the earth may hold, or erase, or transform, our memories.

Emilybudd.com