Early Shinada
Bless the Dark, 2018
Digital video, 12 min.
I could not see the mountain that stood less than a mile from the house. The smoke was so thick and so close to my eyes I thought the accident was inside of them. Having never experienced a forest fire before I was unaccustomed to the deformations of sensing that accompanied the particulate transformation of redwoods and firs, grass and animals into cloud.
No escaping in the fields of open valley, blur pushed through my entire field of vision filling my head until I was slow like swimming, the road just a voided grey. The non-escape of the white cloud displaced the sky and pulverized the sun into a distributed brightness held evenly in the air as if there was no one source.
No wind would come to break the cloud, and despite its heaviness, an entire landscape suddenly mobile, migrating like birds in charnel flight, it never fell. In as little as a month I had watched the green water-rich grass become yellow and brittle, the crunch it made like crackling stoves until the golden mat reached the doorstep and I realized the entire house was now clutched in kindling as the fires grew closer.
Bless the Dark is the video channel of a multimedia performance synthesizing music, spoken word, and immersive installation that situates the evolutionary history of the five senses within crises of response, such as bystander apathy and ecological shift. It was made on the Kesey Farm in Pleasant Hill Oregon while the coast was on fire.
Shinada’s work is presented as part of Vox Populi’s ongoing 4th Wall series dedicated to screening new film and video works by emerging artists.
Early Shinada: Bless the Dark is curated for 4th Wall by Jim Strong in conjunction with his concurrent exhibition Flight of Fancy.
Events
- Friday, October 5, 6-10pm | Opening: October’s First Friday Reception
About the artist
Early Shinada is a writer and interdisciplinary artist whose work stages collective moments of witness around live relays of history. Through text, movement, video, and immersive installation her performances open the material culture of authority to cross-questioning by personal narrative and the entangled histories of law, ecology, technology, and economics. The collaged simultaneity of word, image, and sound produce a double-speak that Shinada uses to explore the interplay between lived reality and cultural experience. An active wisher of bonds, she is a committed collaborator and community organizer. See More.