Ritornello (What Vincent Said About Yellow) (2018)
Single channel HD video, stereo.Digitized archive photo, archive and synthesized sound, animation.
Ritornello (What Vincent Said About Yellow) derives from my earlier piece Ready, Set (2012) via a 2017 version I produced for a two-story media wall display at the University of Mary Washington. Sometime in the mid 60s, my mother took a Kodak snapshot of my uncle and father standing in a parking lot at the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, Kansas. Their poses — my uncle stiff-armed in profile, my father a bit more relaxed, hand in pocket — called to mind David Hockney’s subjects in his painting American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), and for that reason I remembered it and eventually took it up as a motif for composition. For me, Ritornello is somewhat formalistic, a time-object referencing cubism and counterpoint as well as the thematic ideas of ritual and return. It also references Vincent van Gogh's many iterations of his blue/yellow/orange palette.