Two hundred years on from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting ‘Wanderer Above The Sea Fog’ (1818), another lone figure finds itself looking out at the world, but it is instead caught in a purgatorial state, endlessly alternating between playing forward and playing in reverse.
What was paint is now compartmentalized video; what was searching for the Sublime is now caught in a secularized subversion.
'Subsidium Vitae' is Latin for ‘Life Support’, which refers to the technological setup that works to sustain existence, but it also alludes to the foundations of our being. Looking into consciousness within the world leads to temporality, and temporality demands the placement of subjective, phenomenological experience at the forefront of all matters. The fast, alternating text on each screen utilises the mechanics of our perception to produce experiential stimulations of varying meanings, which oneself can deconstruct and re-interconnect through the perceptual faculty of attention.
The entire multi-video sculpture is itself a metaphor of perception through its use of technological retrofitting; our perception reconstructs reality within its own patterns and faculties, therefore giving clarity through abstraction, a process of gain and loss.