Images - Woolfalk_Lears_Salley

Portal

Prologue: Portal. A warrior from No Place uses the detritus of our world to conjure a portal that gives us access to theirs, and the viewer is invited to imagine how to use it.

Diary of a Phantom Ride

Chapter 1: Diary of a Phantom Ride. This animation depicts the journey of the narrator en route to No Place. As she travels through drawings that evoke star cartography and the seven wonders of the world, she recounts her experience of observation and displacement.

Self and Landscape

Chapter 2: Self and Landscape. As the Self and the Landscape collapse into one another and negotiate forms of activity and passivity, the narrator explains their sensual interaction in language evoking plant biology and early educational films.

Death and Kin

Chapter 3: Death and Kin. The Self has aged and reached the end of her life. In gestures suggesting the Butoh performance of Kazuo Ohno, she constructs her own tombstone and her relatives mourn her passing. The sentiment of loss breaks down the linearity of time, until finally the body transforms into landscape once again.

The Emptiness of Equivalence

Chapter 4: The Emptiness of Equivalence. Here the Self responds with her own account of encounter. Through gestures that recall early photographic motion studies, she offers her perspective on corporeal difference in No Place.

Meeting

Chapter 5: Meeting. Two beings in No Place watch a video depicting another pair of beings who attempt to subdue one another with conflictive movements. They call the others their ancestors. Then, the two groups meet and exchange gifts, suggesting that the social world of No Place encompasses conflict as well as symbiosis.

Empathy

Chapter 6: Empathy. Two juvenile beings observe the end of the previous video on a small screen in a garden-like environment. When it ends, they perform a symmetrical dance to reinforce their friendship. Chrysalis-like covers envelop them, and they emerge metamorphosed as adult creatures of the sort we have been observing throughout the piece.

Portal

Epilogue: Portal. The warrior who conjured the portal to No Place travels to our world to collect its remains, and the narrator returns to reflect upon the possibility of understanding between worlds.