Dark Horse

2003, 6:54

 

A ‘painterly’ reworking of a short clip of a horse from family vacation footage shot during a visit to a private ‘zoo’.  With the original Hi-8 tape accidentally taped over, all that remained was a VHS copy.  A plaintive soundtrack underscores the brooding, claustrophobic quality of the work, with the charged visual space also becoming the site of an ‘ode’ to the ‘compromised’ VHS aesthetic produced through the low-tech tape-to-tape transfer.  Finally, the work functions, retrospectively, as a terse autobiography hinging on the irony of the “lover of horses” (the meaning of the artist’s name) born with a debilitating allergy to horsehair.