Four Lives

Description:

While in residence at Western Front, Brice Canyon produced the single-channel video Four Lives. The work opens with artist Cornelia Wyngaarden in a sound studio, operating a mixing desk as audio is recorded onto reel-to-reel tape. The camera remains fixed on her while the disembodied voices of Jeanette Reinhardt, Mary McQueen, Chick Rice, and Vibeke Rasmussen are heard in succession, each speaking in a different language.

In the final section, titled “A Portrait for Gertrude Stein,” the previously unseen speakers appear in a video collage. Fragments of each of their faces are spliced together into a single, composite figure, which shifts through various configurations onscreen. Over this image, Wyngaarden reads an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s 1935 essay “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” reflecting on the expressive possibilities of repetition: “I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them…”

Video documentation is available upon request.