Breath Study (#YouBetweenMe)

Imagine climbing into someone else’s breath to find your own.

What would this feel like?

Breath Study (#YouBetweenMe) inserts the viewer into a space that could never otherwise be occupied.

Contemplative, and reaching towards what author and educator Carol Becker calls Archetypal Time—towards a collectively shared representation reminding us of what it is to be human, this two-channel video and sound installation, Breath Study (#YouBetweenMe) immerses the viewer in the natural rhythmic act and phenomenology of breath through a compression of time and inversion of space.

Entering into a narrow room, extreme close up shots of a breathing torso are projected on parallel walls. Both intimate and larger-than-life, each video (one of the front body, the other of the back body) is projected to a scale that fills the walls. In both videos, the camera composition closely frames my lower thoracic body, where the main breathing muscle, the diaphragm, is located. The viewing space is between these video images, an inversion of the space of breathing action within the body. From in-between these vantage points that can not otherwise be seen simultaneously without ocular intervention, the viewer is given opportunity to vibrationally attune to the environment of breath. The only real action being that of a natural occurrence many pay little attention to unless it is impeded. Lingering in this environment, one experiences duration, and in duration there is an opportunity to move into deep breathing, which can alter time by slowing down the world. In this way, we begin to experience our own complexity and that of our species’ memory as well. Embodied duration serves here as a form of sculptural multiplicity. Breath is a voice that underscores this notion through the implicit polyphony it draws attention to and that further develops within the installation space.

Filmed successively, rather than simultaneously, a phased undulation of body and breath unifies in an experience as the two projections of this one body breathing at different moments of life. The variations of tempo and texture that emerge activate one’s experience in the space of the art, and in the space of the viewer’s own body. Breath Study (#YouBetweenMe) reveals an intimate architecture that is both mirror and invitation for the viewer to be with one’s own breath.

 

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