Separation of the Earth (By Fire)

Separation of the (Earth by Fire) is a multi-disciplinary project that includes print collages, audio, and video. Together these works rethink the politicization of the image of the child, using David Wojnarowiczʼs “One Day This Kid Will Get Larger,” as a conceptual springboard. From pre-existing mainstream films, the video uses imagery of violent encounters between children and adults. The most repetitive of which is sourced from the film A Home of Our Own, which aired frequently on the Family Channel throughout the 1990s. As the violence unfolds, images meld together. A child’s screaming mouth transforms into a fleshy void. Assemblage and deconstruction, erasure and visibility breakdown. The audio is a three-part choral arrangement composed by Angelo Madsen Minax and performed by his friends. The lyrics were developed using a text-collage practice to remove the call to action sensibility from “One Day This Kid Will Get Larger,” leaving only Wojnarowiczʼs most poetic scraps of language. From these scraps a new text is born.