Sentences

Sentences is a beguiling, hypnotic meditation on the poetics of space. In Magenheimer’s book Beige Pursuit (Wendy’s Subway 2019) she wrote a poem called Sentences as a way to play with the elasticity of architectural and psycho-social spaces, turning a prismatic gaze on in-between places like doorways and bathrooms. This video draws on and reanimates that language. We watch sentences appear on screen, slowly warping and swaying to the music, fragments of an album by frequent collaborator Joe Williams. These musical elements never quite cohere, but arrive at oblique angles, evoking an expanded cinematic space of their own. Magenheimer’s heavily manipulated footage never rests either, but gradually changes color and shape, reminding us that stasis is always already an illusion anyway and that space, like language, is a convenient temporary agreement, a functional fantasy about form. Sentences is, in a way, one extended temporal threshold, the verge, the unknowing but fascination with being about-to-know, as one is about to fall asleep and dream.