10,000 years

10,000 years (video still with paper headdress) 1998
live artwork for video. 10:30 minutes. Color.

10,000 years (2m clip) 1998
live artwork for video. 10:30 minutes. Color.
Can be screened as a single channel festival or installation piece

click here for streaming rental, educational purchase & educational streaming info & orders

click here to go back to live art for video page

Performed at the studio of
Stephen Rife, St. Paul, MN
11 min

10,000 years is a video self-portrait involving three simple acts; repeatedly tossing thousands of small pieces of paper, singing ‘Amazing Grace’, and hand drumming.

The creation of this piece involved two synchronistic discoveries, one literal and one visual, which were then entwined with the pervasive heartbeat of the drum.

The video’s imagery was discovered almost accidentally, when I was watching rushes for another video (also a self-portrait), in slow-motion. I was already intent on using extended periods of slow-mo imagery to both symbolically and literally transform time and even reality. I like the parallels in this ‘disruption’ of everyday reality and those that are achieved through ritual and ceremony.

Meanwhile, I’d been making paper mache for a pyrotechnic artwork, and had been playing around shooting video of myself throwing piles of paper I’d ripped into the air. This action lent itself to my intentions with slow motion with more poetry than I’d been able to achieve with intentionally devised images.

At about the same time, I’d experienced an unexpected, poignant rediscovery of the song ‘Amazing Grace’. The song had popped into my mind while walking down the street one day, and lodged itself there, even though I’d never paid it any attention before that time, beyond its familiarity as a widely known song.

I could only remember the first two lines, and began wishing I knew the rest and wondering about their content. A couple of days later I came to a chapter in the book I was reading in which the author uses ‘Amazing Grace’ as a vehicle for discussing concepts of its namesake – grace. The chapter opened with the complete words of the song and a line by line investigation. The author is Christian, and yet I found the spiritual concepts he described compatible with my own, despite the cultural disparity, and my own rather negative associations with the Christian religion, given its primary role in the genocide of Native people.

Singing and using ‘Amazing Grace’ in this piece became, in part, my way of making peace with Christianity. By focussing on these synchronicities, and their entwinement with moments and acts of grace, as well as on the fundamental connections within all spiritual traditions, a symbolic movement is made toward a place where the limits of physical reality and the boundaries between different belief systems are transcended.