The Sunshine Bores | The Daylights

This small project extends my response to Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves, from earlier works, The Tree Alone and The Weight of Centuries (from 2009-2010). The work takes the form of a single-channel video with audio tracks contributed by artist and musician, Rachel Blumberg, and a photographic composite - both including text excerpts from the novel.

"[Woolf’s] texts are interspersed with still and moving images, sometimes split-screen, of leafless trees, right-side-up and upside-down, against blue and gray skies. All the while, the soundtrack alternates between silence and a woman’s voice repeatedly singing fragments of the phrase “The sunshine bores the daylights out of me” (which sounds like something Woolf may have written, but is not) as she builds phrases into the entire sentence. Her unaccompanied mellow and melodic voice slowly starts and stops, sometimes in off-register layers, in stark contrast to the Rolling Stones’ high-energy-sexually-driven performances of their 1972 song, “Rocks Off,” from which the lyric is quoted. Roe’s mashup of a Modernist’s written text, a classic rock group’s refrain, and her own artistic imagery peacefully washes in and recedes, much like a wave."

Kendra Paitz, Lead Curator, University Galleries at Illinois State University

Curatorial text from the exhibition catalogue, Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy

FULL IMAGE

LINK TO VIDEO

INSTALLATION VIEWS