Circles 1

Catacombs 1a

Punchdrunk

2008

Esprit d’escalier

Esprit d’escalier, 2.5 minutes, 2007

With Esprit d’escalier, a French phrase that means not able to think of or to come up with a response or retort until it is too late (after you’ve descended the stairs and left) I brought the desire to celebrate my mother’s language after her death. I’m interested in the relationship of the written to the spoken word, the relationship of typography to handwriting, the physical characteristics of words and individual letters. My mother died of Alzheimer’s, and, as the disease progressed, I was fascinated by what she remembered and when, and her movements in and out of consciousness, which resulted in often odd combinations of words and phrases with traces of her earliest memories. Here I explore a text that I recorded the week before she died, recreated with my own handwriting and voice, which parallels the nonsense of the children’s rhyme. As in Alzheimer’s the earliest memories are the last to go, I include a short excerpt from a letter she wrote in 1955, in her own handwriting, which gives us a small taste of the very different woman she once was.

Sam Tanya 17

Adolescence. 2004, 10:35.

Dangling Participles

Out my window

Out My Window from Myrel Chernick on Vimeo.

Domestic Interventions

1992 – 2000

She and I

She and I tells the story of my paternal grandmother, whom I never knew, and whose name I share. It speaks specifically of my grandmother’s life and mine, our connections, describes the city of Winnipeg where she lived and my relationship to it, the history of my family there, and addresses general stories of women’s lives. Events are imagined, remembered, and embellished, against a backdrop of Winnipeg as it is now, on the prairies and downtown, as well as the neighborhoods of the north end. Value is given to previously unrecorded events, and women’s lives are acknowledged.

After the opening titles, elements of women’s lives are related in three formats and interwoven segments. A grandmother’s story unfolds as vertically scrolling text through images of water and land, and a brief glimpse of an older and younger woman talking together. A voice-over, alternating between she and I, relates memories and anecdotes. Another voice-over presents a Yiddish poem, untranslated, for its lilting rhythm and related images of gravestones and obituaries. A young daughter impersonates past and present, neighborhoods are explored, and a long sequence of washing dishes conveys the repetition of housework. The triumph of cleanliness, order over chaos, ends the story.

She was, she wasn’t

162 slides of text are projected two at a time in a dark room. The slides are programmed to dissolve in and out during an approximately 12-minute loop. The texts range from paragraphs to short phrases to single words in a meditation on creativity and procreativity, the possible conflation of female voices—mother, artist, daughter, lover—that asks questions, fractures stories, and changes color gradually, fading in and out from pink left/blue right to blue left/pink right, conveying the wide range of thought and activity, connection and disjunction that comprises the artist/mother’s life. The language in the short texts functions as a substitute for the images in a traditional slide show.

Frazer Ward writes in the essay “Foreign and Familiar Bodies” in the catalog of the exhibition Dirt and Domesticity in 1992:

She Was, She Wasn’t is unreliably reflexively autobiographical. It shifts about among fragments of first-person narrative and apparently fictional narrative; between observation, speculation and quotation. Here experience guarantees little: the conventional round of domesticity, the relation between motherhood and femininity,is itself a complex, ongoing interplay of representations, a continuous process of intermingling. In short, it’s a mess. And just as well.

View video: She was, she wasn’t