Time-Based Art

My time-based work is in audio, video, and performance and concerns discovery regarding text and image and uses tools, prompts, and experiments to queer action and interaction, and as a way to get over or get around stale notions of the self. See more in-progress and related work on my Vimeo Page

Elk woke Here Once (aware of the world already)

video, audio, 8 min 5 sec, 2024

Elk woke here once (aware of the world already), video, audio, 8 min 5 sec, Sarah Rushford, 2024 

Credits 

Made and Directed by Sarah Rushford

Actors Juleen Eun Sun Johnson, and Briseida Pagador

Written by Sarah Rushford, Juleen Eun Sun Johnson, and Briseida Pagador

Additional Crew Deb Seitz and Agnes Zahina

Work Description
The project Elk woke here once (aware of the world already) is a single-channel video that shows two women actors speaking with one another as they say a poetic dialog they have written. They converse in a mossy, wet, highly textural Oregon riverside landscape on a small farm. Visual and aural details of the lush landscape are a vehicle for the spoken poems, and the actors' unique exchange. The work resonates with an original, poignant tone through which a deep attention to language, skepticism, and care are revealed. 

Each actor says the poem the other actor has written. They wear large headphones playing a recording of the other actor speaking, as they say it aloud.   The script was made by weaving two individually written poems that were not revealed to the other writer before recording took place. While this is simply a reading of two poems woven together, the exchange is also an experiment in recognition, and cognition.

The actors and writers of the piece are Juleen Eun Sun Johnson, and Briseida Pagador.  Sarah Rushford, artist and director, worked with the two writers in specifically designed writing workshops to develop the script. In the workshops the group brought their favorite creative writings by which they felt recognized. and the notion of feeling recognized by creative writing was discussed. The writers used a generative energy created by sharing their chosen readings to write the script. 

What is the word for the day after tomorrow?

video, audio, 31min, 2023, and video installation, 2023

See project transcript and credits.

This video installation is an alternative publication of a peculiar, original lyric essay. It depicts twenty-two people concentrating on vocalizing this essay as they hear it through a wireless headphone. Elements of each participant's individuality are revealed through their contribution to this game of listening-while-speaking. Concerned with discovery, the piece uses textual experiment to queer action and interaction, as a means to sidestep stale notions of the self. It might suggest that when we speak, we should listen at the same time; to know and show our true selves by discovering one another. 

At its heart the work aims to engage ingenuity, lead toward more generative and expansive forms of reading, and publish the imperative of active listening. 

The work troubles a conclusive telling of care, loss, motherhood, perception, and emotional proximity. It's a literary photographic ritual that transforms cool, at times factual prose into embodied language. The essay's tone, style, and genre shift and then snap together using the video/audio cut not as an injury to time but as connective tissue; the grammar of moving image communicates as much as the actual words. The work is restrained, but it also reveals irreverence toward orthodoxy and humor about loneliness and awkward interaction. Moments of candidness and the embrace of error break illusion, invite examination of the work's construction and allow speakers' thoughts about the experience to be heard. 

Items that illuminate the text are hidden in plain sight near and farther from the viewing area. The simple bench is handmade from alderwood which carries a protective symbolism. Even its pattern of slats (that at once support and free the viewer) and the oblique angle of the monitor denote flexible care. A basket of blankets, plants, fruit, and subtle drawings form the rest of the quiet, playful installation.

What is the word for the day after tomorrow. solo exhibition at Rubus Discolor Project , April 2023, video installation publication, (Adia Gibbs, project participant) 31 min 44 sec, photos by Nina Johnson

What is the word for the day after tomorrow. solo exhibition at Rubus Discolor Project , April 2023, video installation publication, photos by Nina Johnson

I also knew this

video, audio, 9 min, 2023. PASSWORD = this

"I also knew this" is a writing and video project that re-thinks the status of authorship and embraces flexibility and recognition in the context of varied lived experiences. The project documents women engaged in a ritual saying of poems that explore motherhood and the artist's identity.

3. I won’t tell Irene, who is very good to me.

audio installation, 10 min, 2023

In this audio installation publication of a peculiar, original essay, the viewer sits in a small but decadent room in the PNCA Solheim Library to listen through headphones and examine the elements of a charged environment. 

A shifting narrative scape of land, animals, people, and sustenance accrues and resonates as the spoken text, carefully recorded, and rich with images, unfolds. The voice of Portland filmmaker Jodi Darby is featured in the recording yet she didn't read the text aloud. Instead, she repeated it as she heard it through headphones, and this lends her delivery a curious tinge. Rushford uses this game as a tool to cast aside the constraints of dramatic theater, and to queer personal action, and interpersonal interaction. 

Each word, item of furniture, equipment, and other objects are considered for their associative potential and their emergence into the artist's inquisitive process. At its heart, the work aims to trouble systems of consumption and compel the viewer toward generative, self-examining, and expansive forms of reading. 

4. Essay
audio installation, 21 min, audio on cassette with headphones, bench, 2021

Essay is an audio piece played on a cassette player with headphones. The player sits on a wooden bench on which there is also room for the listener to sit. The audio is a recording of me reading an essay about my deceased sister and her illnesses. The reading is peculiar. Instead of simply reading the text, I flipped the page over, held it up to the light, and read the essay backward through the paper.  As a result, it’s full of hesitation, mispronunciation, annoying slowness, and frustration, as well as other emotions related to the subject matter of the essay.  I wrote but didn’t edit this essay, then delivered it in a way that betrays any semblance of successful reading. It’s a conceptual text.

5. Very Bad Red
Audio, 5 min 31 sec, 2022, Sarah Rushford and Gia Gonzalez

6. Zero Doesn’t Mean Nothing

video and audio, 7min 34sec, 2021

In this experimental autobiographical essay, a sister dies and a baby is born.

 7. Jayne telephones
performance, 2014, 2019, and ongoing

Jayne telephones is a performance of a list of the approximately six hundred most common women’s names (derived from the 1990 US census) paired with the six hundred most commonly used verbs. The pairings are listed in order of their ranking beginning with the first most common. The list begins with "Mary is" and ends with the "Christi devotes”.  The list is bound in a newsprint book that resembles a catalog or telephone book and is passed among a group of participants who read aloud as a performance.  

Older Works

What are the next three letters, 2014, video and audio, 15min 35sec
Metaphoric images are intercut with footage of women whose eyes are closed, saying, as if in a trance, Rushford’s script of original poetic compositions.

Semblance, 2014, lens projecting non-electronic image of viewer on 18"x24" graphite covered paper 40”x20”x18

Carbon Study 2, The Water Carriers, 2010, video and audio, 3min 8 Sec
Carbon Study II (the water carriers), which was shot in a park in Berlin in July 2010, is a two channel video. On the left, a group of children are being led in a set of movements. Their goal is to each keep a small plate filled with water as they move. On the right, a hand is shown in close-up. The hand is covered in a layer of reflective graphite. On the palm is a live projection made by holding a reflective lens in the fingers. It shows details of trees, sky and parts of the same park where the children are being taught.