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Naked Doom

Edward Rankus

1983 00:17:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3Video
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Description

Rankus’s elegant black and white video takes us into an intensely dark inner world. The visual elements remind us of clues in a mystery story: dark corridors, half-revealed bodies, a man with a gun, a throw of the dice. But Rankus complicates the mystery by adding scientific symbols: a flickering brain, see-through bodies, diagrams of the head, a skeletal hand. Rankus uses quirky props, lights, actors, and computer imaging to create a labyrinthine space reminiscent of di Chirico’s paintings—one that reads as an open metaphor for the subterraneous desires of the human mind.

This title is also available on Ed Rankus Videoworks: Volume 1.

About Edward Rankus

Edward Rankus is an independent video artist whose work references the symbolic systems of science-fiction films, behavioral psychology experiments, sub-atomic particle physics, Spanish mysticism, and Zen Buddhism. Concerned with the hazy borderline between inner and outer worlds, his work invokes a surrealist/expressionist aesthetic. As a student of Dan Sandin and the late Phil Morton, Rankus is part of the second generation of Chicago video artists whose approach to video differed from their more process-oriented teachers. Rankus's work is masterfully edited and deeply ironic, and he is able to wring drama from mundane subjects. The play of symbols is very important in Rankus's work, which in some ways approaches still-life painting in its juxtapositioning of essential elements to create moods and meanings. Rankus layers various cultural symbols and builds on viewer expectations to question the arbitrary conventional boundaries of "reality" and "self."

"These tapes visually investigate perennial themes of impermanence, the disillusion and mortality of one's body--often using simple objects as stand-ins for that body."
--Ed Rankus