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I Love You Forever
video installation,
first installed (1996) in a sea container
as part of Containers 96, Art Across Oceans, Copenhagen, Denmark.
The piece functions as a repository for the specific psychological conditions of longing, ambivalence, disorientation, and distress.
The nature of a sea container is to travel from port to port, an itinerant carrier of goods from one part of the world to another. In this work, the video image inside the container coincides with the emotional experience of being "at sea", of having no real sense of home.
As the visitor enters the container he faces a large pale video projection showing a vast prairie and a gabled house at the edge of town. The image has been overexposed and recorded on an overcast day. A zoom lens keeps the image in exactly the same position relative to the frame as the camera slowly moves away. If this technique were done flawlessly, the sensation on the part of the viewer would be one of remaining still. But the slight inaccuracies of the camera work create a sense of moving away, even as the image continues to fill the back wall. The foreground drifts to the right, as the background slips farther over to the left. After several moments the viewer becomes aware that the movement has reversed itself. As the camera proceeds forward, the lens pulls back, and the images remains in a restless but relatively stable position. This back and forth, push and pull, rhythm of attraction and resistance continues throughout the piece.
Camera moves (e.g. moving forward as the lens pulls back) create a feeling of being unsettled, of being caught in a moment of indecision. Maybe the elements are coming together; maybe they're coming apart. The faint video image alternates between a drive through frozen prairie and an unsteady view of a large house, mimicking psychological states of erratic indecision and sudden paralysis.
A voice-over begins, "I imagine coming home earlier than expected". The narration details expectations, disappointments, suspicions, and longing, tracing the tidal pulls of the heart. The only certainty in this emotional topography are the words, "I know that you lie to me", at the beginning and end of the text.
Five thousand fortune cookies cover the floor, scattered below the "horizon" of the image. Interspersed between the vanilla cookies are 100 glass fortunes cookies with two alternate fortunes printed in red: "I know that you lie to me" and "I love you forever". Over time the (real) cookies crumble, leaving the (glass) cookies to catch the projected light.