ALWAYS

This installation is about loss, and to some extent, regret. It brings together two cultural fragments: an unusually ambivalent love song, and a piece of urban poetry that I first came across in the Thomas Guide street maps of Burbank and Glendale. I noticed that the various areas of the Forest Lawn cemeteries in each city were marked on the street map, and that when read in sequence these words and phrases created a poem that was both funny, tragic and pathetic. In the cemeteries themselves these names appear only as black text stenciled on the curb stones. This is the source of the text that appears in the “living room” and “office” gallery spaces.

I found a similar pathetic quality in the well known song “You Were Always on My Mind”. The lyrics of this song seem to me to describe a relationship that is far closer to reality than is normally found in a “love song”. This is a song steeped in regret, rather than passion or pain. The melody of “You Were Always on My Mind” provides the sound track for the video projection in the third (“dining room”) gallery space. This was played by a classically trained vibraphone player and recorded in a converted church. The video itself takes the form of a single image of a cloud floating above a snowy landscape. The cloud and the landscape are all computer generated. The movements of the cloud are slow and graceful at first, occasionally becoming more dynamic, alternating between apparently natural and obviously artificial. The cloud remains in the center of the frame at all times, its movements synchronized with the music.

The fourth space in the gallery is a long dark corridor with a number of locked doors, just below the ceiling a verse of the song has been picked out in glow-paint, with the chorus apparently floating at the end of the corridor: “You were always on my mind”.

All of the elements in this installation refer not to death itself, but to what it leaves behind, to the experience of those who remain. The song of a thoughtless lover, a series of romantic landscape descriptions and emotional clichés painted in the gutters of a cemetery, these things all fail in their attempts to encapsulate death, regret and guilt in a way that would let us put it away. Although they are pathetic I also find them poignant in their banality and very sad. I wanted to create this piece in a way that reflected the failure of expression that I found in these sources.

The 3D digital animation process that I used to create the dancing cloud is particularly laborious and requires meticulous mathematical manipulation of a series of algorithms to create the illusion of a living cloud. This forced me to work in a way that was completely at odds with the kind of impulsive expressionism so often associated with the artist, while at the same time attempting to create an emotionally engaging image of regret personified.