Artist Statement - Hyper-reality

(no my project does not have an actual title. they never do. ^^; I do not think in titles, only full lines.)

Whenever I am in an old building, a place that has been used for many years, I feel a very strong sense of time, and wonder what the lives lived within it were like, who the people were, what the places meant to them. For this project, I decided to take the opportunity to visually reveal what I would normally only feel or imagine. While I had initially considered various points of view of different people who had living in a space, I decided to pare it down to a single person, as it lends a more intimate, personal feeling. My good friend Haruna Tsuchiya danced as a ghost for a previous video project of mine, so my first thought was to ask her for a reprise of the role. I knew I did not want the standard sort of floating white sheet for my ghost, I wanted her to have more personality, to be more of an echo of one life lived in the place.
Various circumstances led to the setting of the video being inside and around the building that was formerly the Fredonia Normal School, built around 1900 and remodeled in the 1980s for apartment housing. Where once students roamed the halls with friends and worried over exams, eager and ambitious as myself, there are now placidly plastered walls and the tastefully muted decorations of tenants. Though I was unfortunately unable to gain access to the oldest, least remodeled portion of the building (due to structural safety issues), I was able to at least peer in the windows there. Also, having the bulk of the footage shot within the areas now lived in added an extra layer of history, allowing me to shift perceptions from how the place seems to lives there currently and seemed to lives passed.
I firmly believe that there is more to reality than what is seen, so it was by drawing on this that I created my hyper-reality, hoping to reveal clearly to others the glimpses of lives past that are usually only felt in vague emotions.