about Twelve From The Underground
Production still from “Silence for Herbert”
Visual Artists Kristina Faragher and Curt LeMieux are working collaboratively on a series of twelve videos. "Twelve from the Underground," provides a unique perspective on historical notions of the American West through the investigation of randomly selected individual lives. The duo begins each piece in the series by randomly picking a date from the early to mid-nineteen hundreds and a location in the United States west of the Mississippi River. The artists use Internet based search engines and agree to center a given video upon the very first individual located who died within the specified parameters. Biographical accounts and other historical information guide the work both conceptually and aesthetically. The imagery is deliberately meditative and often abstract or sketchy, as the artists believe that the series should function outside of the typical language and narrative structures. The work should remain open to a host of interpretations, just as notions of history should remain in a state of flux. Faragher and LeMieux have no interest in literal interpretation of historical texts via a sort of video art documentary but rather seek to provide a sequence of symbols and prompt imagination and inquiry.
Amy Scott, Curator of Visual Arts at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles, states that "Twelve from the Underground," succeeds because it occupies a liminal or transitional space between historical opposites including: realism vs. abstraction; notions of "authenticity" vs. images that change over time; diligent research vs. interpretive methods, and the use of primary sources vs. the ephemeral aspects of digital media. Scott explains that Faragher and LeMieux manage to address Western history in a way that exposes the gaps and tensions inherent but often hidden within that process. Scott analyzes the causal trajectory within conventional Western history and the intentionally impressionistic approach to "Twelve from the Underground." Please click here to watch Amy Scott discuss "Twelve from the Underground."
