The Imaginary Kaleidoscope

The Imaginary Kaleidoscope, 2020, 4K video, color, sound, TRT: 11 min 32 sec; excerpt 1min 43 sec ((voiceover by James Lam Scheuren)

The film is composed of a series of close-ups of animal sculptures, small and large. The close-ups, which excise context from the frame, suggests portraiture. Even without context, lawn sculptures are recognizably mass-produced and made of inexpensive, yet robust material intended to endure outside. The male voiceover reads a monologue quilted with quotations from the western canon in which the author ventriloquizes an animal voice (i.e. Kafka, Rilke, Bishop, Tolstoy). The video offers a meditation on voyeurism and the performative quality of public-facing private displays, and on the desire to reintegrate animals into our life. The yard art animal sculptures are dinky monuments to that desire for reintegration. I gathered the footage in towns across the Northeast, Midwest, and the South suggesting a collective place-less portrait of Americana.

FESTIVALS & SCREENINGS

First Persian Independent Experimental Short Film Festival, 2022
Semi-Finalist at BLOW-UP · International Arthouse Filmfest · Chicago, 2021
BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival, 2021
Tune in to Green, 2021
We Make Movies Film Festival, 2021
The 18th Annual Iowa City International Film Festival (ICDOCS 2021), 2021
Casserole Series, 2021
Transient Visions: The Moving Image Festival, 2020