Marina and Yucca

Owen Kydd

2012 · Two-channel digital video, color, silent, 3 min., 30 sec. · Photographs

Kydd makes what he calls "durational photographs"—a paradoxical description signaling the artist’s dissatisfaction with film’s conception of time. Poised between cinema and still photography, the pieces only became possible when the resolution of video imagery had reached a high enough level that a moving image could at least approach the mesmerizing clarity of the best color photography. Marina and Yucca is a two-channel piece in which the spiky spray of a yucca plant juts out toward the viewer, trembling ever so slightly in the California breeze, while in the other monitor a seated young woman sits immobile with her eyes closed. Inanimate and animate become intertwined through an absolute minimum of "cinematic" means—a photographic diptych that has its own complex time signature that alternatingly invites and rebuffs our identification.

Artist

Owen Kydd

Date

2012

Medium

Two-channel digital video, color, silent, 3 min., 30 sec.

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2014