Grotesk

VIDEO · 2001

A boy makes funny grimaces while his mother sings a lullaby

This is one of my earliest videos taken of my former stepson, Billy who was very inventive and theatrical. I got his mother, Rachael to sing a song without words that I dubbed against the sequence. The colour distortion was from an early video editing program. The title, Grotesk, in the German spelling, is inspired after the definition by Victor Hugo of the grotesque being a collision of the beautiful and the ugly. This work is quite self-contained, as if existing in its own time-space capsule. Looking at it now I see some pathos and vulnerability.