Passional 1
Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly sweet feminine revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality “sugary.”
- Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Passional 1 is the first in a series of video installations in which the sinister yet pleasurable potential of the viscous is played out within the confines of a room.
In a seamlessly looped video projection, a mass of honey clings to the top of the wall in a darkened space, slowly building into two bulbous forms which hang and ultimately fall, bathing the room with refracted light. On the facing wall, a monitor displays a looped twelve minute video of honey cascading down a surface towards the base of the screen interrupted by the gentle stroking motions of a tongue.
As the video continues, the licking becomes more frantic and the screen begins to fill with honey which progressively obscures the action of the mouth until the entire screen is drowned in thick, opaque amber. The audio component of the video consists of the ambient sound in the room as the footage is recorded. The subtle sounds of licking develop into an ambiguous mélange of moans, gasps and gurgles from the subject’s disgust and/or pleasure.
Within the darkened space the two videos function in tandem as reciprocal elements engendering a corporeal space through sound, colour and light. As the honey in the monitor fills the screen, the room is filled with it’s ambient colour, first golden, then pulsing with the motion of the tongue and finally shrouded in a dark amber red. The slow gradation of colour within in the installation creates a space the room which mimics the claustrophobic space of the monitor and is further reinforced by the slow but deliberate pulsing of the drips on the facing wall.