Video Out

My Two Grandmothers- Her Great Grandfather- And Me

This installation required the building of a computer switcher (designed and built by Andrew Jaremko) which I programmed: thus the four channels of the installation moved through the 25 monitors and the quilt. By looking at some of the photographs of the installation, you can see some of the configurations. The video monitors then become part of a moving fabric becoming video. The installation was lit as a night garden. The floor monitors were wrapped in saris and situated amongst sandstone rocks and plants. The monitors and rocks, in a sense, making a place of the imagination --a place where my two grandmothers finally met: one from India, the other from Alberta (with family connections moving back to Scotland). The work was shot in Scotland and India, thus conveying my two very distinct senses of place: the nordic and the tropical. I worked with a Topas graphics system. thus giving me access to graphics and animation possibilities. I used text layered over the video image which coulld be read across the monitors (through the programming): 'the absence of home', 'the absence of love', 'the doubling of displacement', 'the doubling of story', 'the doubling of mythologies', and so on. I constructed video photographs on the Targa (output as photographs on a Sony machine) which were sewn into the diamonds of the quilt, making the quilt a homage both to Frida Kahlo (for her painting, 'My grandparents, My Parents and I' -- (also the subject of my video quilt) and to Joyce Wieland for her quilts working out a sense of mythology. Everything in the installation is seen through layers, giving a sense of memory and history as fragments, incomplete, and as distant - seen through time, seen through other people, seen through stories.