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“Just How Lucky…” departs visually from the in-your-face stance of other of my videos. I consider my choices of a modified slideshow format and of familiar Erik Satie pieces as its audio core to be the foundation of the work. The two variations of the video’s visual narrative combine to suggest patterns of stress, adaptation, and transformation of nature, of its current stresses, and of the difficulty of seeing that stress when obscured by the beauty and by two ideologically powered myths: one of the sublime and other the of nature’s natural servitude to humanity.
The sound track carries the weight of calling our own visual enjoyment into question. My alterations, like those of the music, don’t shout. With their frequent use in film and their short cycle, any alteration of the two Satie pieces can suggest discord while still retaining their calming effect. An example is the overlaying of one piece with a backwards clip of itself. The clips seem almost the same, just off. That sense of off is the response I seek and my field recordings, used in concert with Satie while also standing opposite, increase a feeling that things are not what they seem.
Temporal activity rewards the attentive viewer. This drives my use of the slideshow format. It gives opportunity to notice in time what might be missed or ignored in still images or without the implicit commentary of the soundtrack. All images used are my own multilayered work, with more blending and transformations within the video. Layering advances some whispered subtexts that are central to my greater body of work. One is the difficulty of defining where one place ends and another begins, a distinction essential to the ideology of the foreign. Another is that our understanding often comes from connecting the new to the known. Finally, presenting a variant of the initial segment is an effort to suggest that we need to pay greater attention to what we filter out of our notice if we are to shape a positive communal legacy.
Neil Berkowitz is a visual artist in Seattle, Washington. He studied photography at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, followed by studio arts coursework at the New School in the early 1970s. Neil resumed his long-dormant art practice in 2017 and soon after began using layering as the core of his lens-past art. During this time he has been steadily expanding the media he employs. For the past eighteen months Neil has been a non-matriculated student in the Digital Arts and Experimental Media department at the University of Washington in preparation for a new focus on interactive installations.
Since resuming his art making Neil’s work has been selected for 2 solo, 2 group, and nearly 40 juried shows both regionally and nationally. Recent achievements include selection for several residencies, a three work commission for the new Othello branch of the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in Seattle, and a purchase by the City of Seattle for its collection.
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