An anti-narrative adventure traveling through a phantasmagoric environment void of stability. The video presents a bizarre compendium of archival and industrial footage accompanied by a noisy soundtrack of music and voices from the past, as if echoing the ether of the viewer’s mind. Thornton’s distinctive visual style of collaging random elements elicits an eerie sense of being lost amidst past and present, breeding a confusion that complicates any clear reading of the image.
Leslie Thornton is a painter turned video- and filmmaker who teaches in the Modern Culture and Media Program at Brown University. Her lush, complex works explore the mechanisms of desire and meaning, while probing past the boundaries of language and narrative conventions. Difficult to categorize or describe, Thornton’s works are steeped in theoretical interest and filled with rich and intuitive imagery in experimental narratives crossing science fiction, ethnographic, and documentary forms.