On a digitized sword-and-sandal movie set, the birds are indivisible cells that walk through holes in the ritual and through invisibility in the fabrics. Vapors hang over the conference, black and green. A patriot walks through the plasma. Birds of different colors are brushed out with the vapors. Is this purification, transformation, a tumble, a sentence — movements in an organism’s growth? Have the birds left the building? The finger knows, as it stalls or accelerates the pace while caressing the play button as though it were flesh.
Beverly and Shannon Ketch’s soundtrack is a stacked deck of dizzy recitations and repetitions, matching Jamie Lee Mohr’s complex, sleight-of-hand ceremony: a mash of what Mohr describes as “self-negation spirituality” where clashing symbolic powers negate one another as well, creating, instead of a clear script, a new ritual that circulates a crossfire of alterations and glitches.
• Jamie Lee Mohr: https://vimeo.com/user1959229