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[title]Georgia Wall used her iPhone to shoot Dedication to This View, and the immediacy and intimacy afforded by her handheld device yields a video that upends cinematic conventions, taking a reflexive look at the experience of life in an age of amateur filmmaking and creative piracy.
The New York–based artist abandons any notion of traditional narrative, instead emphasizing shifts in image, sound and tone. Accompanied by a soundtrack that combines the Beatles, house music, indiscernible conversation and snippets of recalled memories, Wall’s voyeuristic eye wanders through bedrooms, clubs and city streets. She intertwines disjointed scenes (an extreme close-up of a beached fish, an elderly woman watching television) with unidentifiable found footage from surveillance tapes or home videos of teenagers lip-synching.
Wall’s seamless edits generate a loose repetition as the 40-minute video veers back and forth between private and public space, surveillance and documentation, and interview and voiceover. While Dedication to This View recounts and reveals to no specific end, its onslaught of audio and images suggests a visual archive of the unrecognized, overlooked and unseen.
Working in the tradition of French filmmaker Chris Marker and Chicago artist Deborah Stratman, Wall (who earned her M.F.A. from SAIC in 2011) seems primarily concerned with the role of repetition and memory in her medium. Her video challenges viewers to think about how they perceive and recall images, especially through a digital lens.