2020 Film and Video Poetry Symposium, November 12, 2020 – January 2, 2021, Los Angeles, CA.
Michael Lasater. Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, MO. Solo exhibition, December 13, 2013 – January 14, 2014.
South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN. Solo exhibition, March 10 - July 8, 2012.
Birthday (2012, rev. 2016)
Single-channel HD video, stereo.
Digital photo, digitized archive photo, digitized archive video, text, sampled sound, animation.
The poet John Ciardi, writing about poetic structure, describes how stanzas or sections of a poem can hang in balance across a single point, like objects in a Calder mobile. Think of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The first three stanzas are filled with narrative description and location detail. Together they prepare for and balance the last stanza, which delivers the full metaphorical impact of the poem. I think that in Birthday we are present in just such a poetic structure – the door, television, flowers, boxers, words – elements referencing memory, time, narrative – on one side of Ciardi’s point of equilibrium, the woman in the party hat (my aunt Judy) on the other. The visual composition balances in just this way, and one may read it as closed. But it is also possible that Judy herself is the point of equilibrium, and that something else, something capable of balancing the composition, exists outside our field of view. Judy may see it quite clearly.