Janice Gomez
Personal Diptych Series:
Holding past and present in El Sereno: Leaving and Landing Đà Nẵng, 2019 paired with Is This Right? Tu(r)ned to E Major, 2020
Digital Photograph, Video, Sound
63 x 24 Inches, 4 minutes 39 seconds
Time has always been present in my work, ticking, pushing, expanding, and contracting. And these days, like previous ones, my work reaches for the available—reimagining, reinterpreting, and repurposing only to hold it in a new definition for a moment; a breath, a beat, suspended. This is another iteration of sharing an image from Holding past and present in El Sereno: Leaving and Landing Đà Nẵng. The first time was in tactile Zine form for “SABOTEURS #5: bitter/sweet.”
You fled yesterday.
We landed today.
You shared how you exchanged notes in class with friends as a young student and the route you took to school.
You were silent about selling black market rice
and where you were when you decided to go.
The ever changing growing and s l o w realizing of uncovering each other’s pasts and changing the understanding of our own. We dismantle. We work. We repeat. In the video Is This Right? Tu(r)ned to E Major, I spent much of quarantine rediscovering old work and questioning their purpose in the present space. Instead of working in ways to preserve pieces of large installations, we made space, we took them apart, one piece at. A time.
Shifting tactile to digital to performance to visual to sound to feeling to worry to hope to us to them tomorrow
and where you were when you decided to go.
*Best viewed on a laptop/desktop with headphones if available.
