unlit fags (Los Angeles)
Four-channel video installation with asynchronous sound
Various durations, looped
2023
Installation documentation as part of The End of Living at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, 2023
Installation documentation as part of The End of Living at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, 2023
unlit fags is a series of single-channel videos reworking footage from New Queer Cinema filmmaker Gregg Araki’s first feature-length film, The Living End. Shot on a minuscule budget with few resources and fewer permits, Araki’s film took the crisis of a specific community (in this case, the AIDS epidemic at a particular moment in the early 1990s) and spun it into a broader generational existential crisis. The videos in unlit fags sample, distort, and re-edit key fragments from The Living End that amplify and elaborate moments of physical and erotic (dis)connection, the repetition and abstraction of found visual material proposing that, rather than seeking to escape where we find ourselves, we would do best to dig in and find our way through. The videos have varying durations, running from just under 30 minutes to over 5 hours, and are intended to be asynchronously looped. They are accompanied by a soundtrack derived from, and synced to, the soundtrack from The Living End.
For installations, several of the unlit fags videos are presented together on monitors attached to fencing structures. that are sourced from, and specific to, the exhibition location. These fences reference a scene from The Living End and also allow for an installation that spatializes the inside/outside, dominant culture/subculture, respectable/revolutionary dichotomies that populate the film, and whose opacity and impermeability are drawn into question by unlit fags.