Project Description
A study of cultural archetypes will no doubt lead eventually to the work of Carl Jung, who proposed that humankind shares a collective unconscious that informs our life experiences. Examining this concept, I thought of this collective place as a kind of haunted realm—a place where these hidden, universal thought-forms live in an inchoate state, waiting to manifest with a suitable host or congregation. The video work Obake Yashiki (Haunted House) pulls familiar archetypes out of a formless purgatory, slowly actualizing their ghostly figures as they ‘enter’ our consciousness. As they reveal themselves and take form, we find the transformation might just be out of our control. The work looks to examine humankind’s hidden nature, which—like Aladdin’s Magic Lamp—can manifest itself in perplexing ways once the genie is out of the bottle.
Appearances by Kinya Zulu Tsuruyama and Keiko Higuchi. Soundtrack was performed live at Obake Yashiki (Bar Gari Gari) and later mastered by Cal Lyall and Keiko Higuchi.
