The Dream Songs
To make The Dream Songs, David Oresick culled videos from YouTube in
which people deliver intimate monologues about grief or loss, ultimately weaving many voices into a new work. Oresick borrows the
title of his video directly from that of an influential book by poet
John Berryman. That set of confessional poems is haunted by suicide
and sorrow, all the while shifting between different tenses and
voices. These aspects were partially the inspiration for Oresick,
mirroring his own themes and uses of montage, but the video goes in
its own direction. As pixelated faces speak through slow tears or
stoic looks, it underscores a common need for expression, a yearning
for connection and emotional relief, in a manner born of a more
networked era.
Oresick appears in the video himself, contributing his own episodic
monologue about a friend’s death. If the artist becomes a veiled
protagonist in this way, Oresick doesn’t differentiate his segments
from the others; he comes across as just another character, entering a
thicket of testimonies to deliver his own. This balances the detached
role of editor with the implicated role of the participant. Yet even
as the artist’s voice joins the chorus, everyone reaching out with
real problems, any sense of a shared experience is offset by the fact
that everyone is talking to an absent listener and sitting alone.
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Oresick recalibrates the emotional effect overall by incorporating
other kinds of user-generated video footage. Someone’s camera records
a gathering storm or sun peeking through the clouds. Other segments
show an elephant pacing in captivity, a deer straining to free itself
from a fence, a doe bleeding into the snow. While functioning as
metaphors, these moments also connect the confessional outpourings to
the world beyond the individual, to the tangible world beyond the
screen. Struggle, we are reminded, is part of nature. To that we might
add that hope, however fragile, is a fully human attribute.
Karsten Lund, Independent Curator
Columbia College Chicago MFA Thesis Exhibition Catalog
May, 2010
Click image to watch.
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