Strout
Model Citizen for Male Tears
"Almost There" is a psychedelic exploration of self doubt and it's damaging effects on personal potential. Our only obstacles are ourselves. Reflecting this, the sense of nearly but never arriving is ever present in the video as the subject attempts to reach a nebulous goal it can never reach. An interpretation of being one’s own obstacle, the subject wears a restricting and reflective suit that makes it impossible to see itself clearly. Likewise, even when the subject faces itself, it does not see clearly, and instead attempts to consume what it has already manifested. Throughout the video, the subject attempts to lead its being out of its self-imposed prison, at times literally, as it pulls it’s body from one shot to the next, using the ropes it is tangled in. The black liquid that eventually the subject must escape from serves as a metaphor for the dark places we go to when we feel unable or unwilling to let go of our biased interpretations of a reality that only exists because we activate it ourselves.
Serotonin for Violent Vickie
ALE is a critical exploration of sameness as a capitalist product of commodification. A metaphor for the flattening of difference in culture, this video uses visual cues that mirror those which have been developed to represent audio. Bodies in the video act as a stand in for time-frequency visual representations that are in sync with the elements of the video’s audio. These bodies wear reflective suits that flatten their features and highlight their conformist and interdependent behavior. As the video unfolds, these bodies gradually become unpredictable and eventually chaotic in their activity, a gesture meant to represent the current and growing movement in resistance and revolution.
Almost There for MRK
The Model Citizen music video takes a playfully critical look at the relationship between queer individuals and the increasingly monolithic and commercial nature of the American Goth counterculture. The counterculture is represented by motionless figures in a plain room. The act of stealing jewelry from the mannequin-like figures acts as metaphor for the queer individual who doesn’t quite fit what has become a static, capitalist space and must forcefully make space for himself. The more he acquires and the more animated he becomes, the more his creative and playful presence brings new life with him, instigating pleasure through dance. Pleasure, which is an act of social resistance to subjugation, increases in intensity throughout the video as our dancers connect with our queer individual and his art—to the point of craze. Visual distortions build as the frenzy between the figures and our queer grows, triggering instability as he is now feeling fetishized. Scenes of isolation interrupt the dance party signifying the depleting effects that being a spectacle have on our queer individual.
Taking visual influence from goth and synth pop videos of the early 1990s while exploring recent themes on the feminine erotic experience, Serotonin is a collision of high contrast collage. Equally playful and aggressive, the project examines romantic attachment and sexual addiction as well as personal empowerment. Our lover collects and nurtures unsalvageable beings—a gesture that mirrors the motherly act of sacrificing self for other at all cost. Images of nature, death, and the occult collide with images of the domestic space signaling the chaotic and interrelated relationship between sex, belief, and disorder. Mirror images clash and tangle, reflecting the enmeshed nature of attachment while rage and dance gesture acknowledgement, awareness, anger and resistance.