Teenage Wasteland--Brief Synopsis:

Project consists of four 20"x30" photographs and 3 minute video.

In Teenage Wasteland (video), a 32 year-old male, acted by myself, travels in a waking slumber, through the routine of the stagnant everyday.  The surreal wonderment and decay of the man’s surroundings cannot penetrate the psyche of a man who exists just to exist.  The man’s space disintegrates through a series of lo-fi illusions. The atrophied psyche awakens slightly to be seduced by his own giant fleshy hand that spins seductively in the man’s living room.  One can only presume that the two characters will join for a pleasurable, non-productive, moment in time. 

The photograph placed at the end of the narrative is the ‘tell or reveal’ of how the low-fi effects were created (artist hanging from rafters to create the illusion of a non-stop spinning hand).  My intention was that the illusions provide meaning in two ways.  First, by situating the artist within the image hanging from the rafters reduces the artist (as the everyman) further into the ridiculous.   Secondly, the illusions, physically arduous and time-consuming, were created to develop an absurdist narrative where an individual with his hand conjoin in masturbation.  The work thereby questions whether the creation of meaning is as meaningless and circularly irrelevant as time spent masturbating.  

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