Sweetheart
2010-2011
single-channel HD video, stereo
5 minutes 43 seconds
VIDEO STILLS
NOTE ON WORK
Neha Choksi’s oeuvre persistently presents a materially bound search for absence. Sweetheart, 2010-11, focuses on a sprig growing from the hollow of a missing limb on an ancient oak tree. It is shot at a cemetery. A good deal of the footage is indirect, reflected off an iconic black square which both reflects and absorbs the image of the sprig. The footage takes us from inside the hollow of the grand oak, out into the cemetery environs, and back again into the site of bodily loss. Structurally each attempt to distill the essence of this youthful sprig breaks down further until the artist's reflection punctures the picture. The eye cannot but settle, unsettle, and rest again. The productive tension between materialist impulses and mental constructs endows her work with the melancholy born of a desire to be immaterial. It was shot on Choksi’s last day living with a lover in Inglewood.
NOTE ON TITLE
An textual addendum to the title when a version of this work was first presented read as follows:
Although I did not pluck anything, and I substitute flower with leaf, the alternate title for Sweetheart is as follows:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is. (Alfred Tennyson)
...that the outer gaze alters the inner thing, that by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire...that for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed. (Ben Marcus)
mark the place
where stood the object
which does not exist
with a black square
it will be
a simple dirge
for the beautiful absence
manly regret
imprisoned
in a quadrangle (Zbigniew Herbert)
CREDITS
Director: Neha Choksi
Camera: Neha Choksi
Editor: Monisha Baldawa, Neha Choksi
Sound, Music: Neha Choksi
SCREENING HISTORY
to come