I Looked Down I Realized I Had A Body
2016-2019
Three-channel video with sound (run time: 1 hour 24 minutes); cast wax; cast sterling silver; acrylic, charcoal, and archival pigment print on canvas
Sound: Alan Shockley
Dancer: Gino Grenek
Dimensions variable
Taking inspiration from Yukio Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, this work explores the detrimental, consumptive, and celebratory aspects of being completely obsessed with an idealized object: here, the human body and its related glories and complications. The dancer in the video moves through a constructed space, exploring one of three states of self-awareness: discovery of self, obsession with self, destruction of self. A three-channel sound landscape composed of sampled and manipulated field recordings provides a dreamy backdrop displacing time and space, while wax and sterling silver casts of the dancer’s hands and feet reinforce corporeal awareness in the viewer. Works on canvas depict collaged images of 19th century alchemical etchings, referencing the imagery in the video set.
As critic Lance Esplund writes, “What are we to make of Brice Brown’s I Looked Down I Realized I Had A Body? Is it dance, film, experimental theater, performance art? Is it a celebration or a lamentation, a narrative or poetry-in-motion? …maybe it explores notions of the body as burden and its environment as cage—impediments to the spirit. Perhaps, instead, it’s a metaphor for degeneration and mortality…Or is it an enigmatic mishmash, an open-ended riddle: all of the above?”
