Last night I went to the Denver Art Museum's world premiere of Stacey Steers' new film, Night Hunter. It was an interesting blend of artistic dreamlike images and disturbing sequences. The film left me with tangible themes drawn from the web of unconscious, alluding to reproduction, loss and fear. There is an installation in the fusebox, on the fourth floor in the new wing of the museum, if you are local and interested. The film consists of over 4000 tiny collages made by the artist over a four year period and each second of footage represents no less then 8 collages. Now that is dedication.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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