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In the Sun Room

Edward Rankus

2008 00:13:27 United States English B&W and Color Stereo 16:9 Video

Description

"A chamber drama set in the confines of an apartment’s sun room, this video further explores visual themes and obsessions found in my earlier works and adds in a few new ones for good measure. Earlier motifs seen here are lightbulbs in pendulum movement, tabletop antics with simple household objects, Christo-like fleshy textures, sketchbook pages torn from their binders, book pages, bookshelves, and flowers. I play a vaguely Walter Mitty-ish figure, who imagines himself as a conductor, as Orpheus, and as conflicted characters in a Greta Garbo movie. A picture book of famous paintings is used as a matrix in which to create ironical juxtapositions, which aggravate my character. Illuminated book pages of William Blake are strewn about to further comment on and reinforce the underlying themes. This is a work exploring dualities: blue light/red light, left side/right side, male/female, desire/revulsion, conductor/performer, constriction/release, rumpled red bathrobe/elegant black Zen robe. While Orpheus strums his lyre, I fumble with lightbulbs. A sparse, mostly percussive sound enlivens the audio track."

--Ed Rankus

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