final project (s?)

follow // fallow (final version) from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

hidden // honestly don't know (another version) from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

wind trees from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

tree hands from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

The truth is, I don't know which of these videos is my final project for this class because I'm just making them. They all have to do with process.I don't know which I will talk about in our critiques tomorrow, or maybe I don't need to talk about one of them but all of them. I feel like they need to be seen in relation to one another in some sort of way whether in sequence or in tandem because it seems that they are parts of a greater whole (a narrative, even? could I be making a narrative?).

Anyhow, here is my statement.

I don’t know where my body stops and the earth begins. There is only a blur. My eyes move; the trees move. We grow, branch, crack, split, decay. We grow again. Pushed by the wind, we speak in whispers, afraid we might say too much, afraid no one will hear.

I forget my body and the earth sometimes. I forget that I need soil, air, rushing water and the afternoon sun. I need to remember that my body is falling apart and coming together, that we're all falling apart and coming together. I make my videos and paintings to help remember.

In using photography, which is mechanically mediated, as well as language, which is personally mediated, I aim to validate the empirically existent as well as the poetic and personal, as reality. The shifting quality of my stop-motion videos is a result of the inevitable movement of my body—and my camera with it—as my eyes move through a space. Moving up close to far away, my eyes never rest for long; forms blur and reiterate one another. I see them again and again, attempting to understand and translate their physicality, growth and decay as they change through time. As a body of work, these visual and verbal fragments come together to form an experience where motion and stability—the sure and unsure—are conflated.