You know that I fervently deny any purpose for Art beyond the expression of the individual self, and so, I’m heartened to see the new video works by my niece, which are utterly hermetic and personal. A painter, she also works in video; dreamy & iconographic. Like much of this genre, it presents a quasi-narrative and non-sequential format of images and sound. In a word: Montage. Video is not the experimental medium, this form of storytelling is. Releasing from the formulas of drama, and amplified by the ubiquity of video content present everywhere to the young person’s perceptions, the ideas about flow of images and meanings in a constructed artistic expression are altering. There are extremes to this; On one hand I am too familiar with very fat books filled with blurry photographs, whose meanings are particular to the photographer through memory or the momentary, irrelevant to the viewer, with an equal pile of words to mediate that difference; On the other, epic installations, or lengthy and episodic “movies”, that display fantastic production values without need for structure, or reference outside of the elaborate internal logic of the work-of-art.

Her videos, Prisoners of Venus, White Sands, &c. are at: http://www.emmapryde.com/