Talk Therapy

Talk Therapy deals with the amorphous quality of future fear through inexpressibility and the power dynamics between speech and text. It features the artist on a therapist's couch, in a state of inarticulate apprehension. A subtitle initially provides transcription, but increasingly begins to intervene, offering suggestions, orientations and presumptions. The work becomes a bloated field of chaotic text in which hierarchies of scale, relevance and importance start to collapse.

Talk Therapy situates anxiety and future fear as spaces of both physical and narrative freeze, while being rich in explosive descriptive content and useless energy. The work is the first in a series of multi-channel video works exploring the tension between description and plot in narrative as a metaphor for the anxious mind. By appropriating tropes of cinema, particularly those whose authority often remains unquestioned, these pieces navigate expectations around storytelling structure, knowledge and language, through the use of humour and surprise.