Documentation of 4-channel video (6-minutes looping); Wood and Mylar Construction – 24’w x 7’h; Sound (31-minutes looping). Sheri Wills/John Schettino. At Home Gallery, Samorin, Slovakia.

Conceived and installed remotely during the peak of the global pandemic, this installation at At Home Gallery in Slovakia combines layers of light, line, and ordinary building materials into a layered panorama – a landscape of glimpsed scenes and inscribed traces. The unfolding imagery is fugitive but insistent and suggests moments that have been lost, erased, or buried, and the urgency of memory in the face of disappearance. The imagery is constantly in play; as soon as the bigger picture becomes visible it seems to slip away. For the sound piece, I was inspired to make a work that connected the sounds in the gallery with sounds from my studio, where I was working remotely. Building from Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, I played the recording of the local singers’ performance at the 2018 opening in the same gallery in my studio, and then re-recorded that recording and repeated that process eighteen times. Like the sound, the 4-channel video utilizes repetition, layering, accumulation, and the artifacts that result from the build-up of imagery, repeated memories, and the forms that either emerge or are excavated from that work. Generational decay is deeply relevant in the space of the gallery, a former synagogue in Slovakia. This piece is as much about what gets lost through re-telling, as it is about the ever-lingering echo of past voices that constantly surrounds us in what may sound like ‘white noise.’