SKENUOMORPHS, graduating exhibition by Sally Walker-Hudecki, Opening: March 25 at PIX Film Gallery. March 26, 27 and 28 at 49 McCaul in the Black Box. Closing: March 28 at 49 McCaul Black Box.
"This thesis uses feminist film theory and filmmaking practices as an entry point to investigate Geschwind's syndrome, a set of symptoms accompanying temporal lobe epilepsy that I suffer from. Geschwind's syndrome has been hypothesized to be responsible for cases of hypergraphia, a form of compulsive documentation, as well as hyperreligiosity, states of euphoria, deja and jamais vu, and altered sexuality. The sudden appearance of such states introduces bumps, slips, skips, and loops into one’s sense of linear time. While these kinds of experiences are present in all human encounters to some degree, one finds them intensified in both the Geschwind Syndrome and cinema, with regard to cinema’s ability to convey ecstatic or heightened affective states, warped perceptions of time, and the desire for self-documentation in distinctive ways. Taking this connection as a starting point, this project explores what the Geschwind Syndrome and cinema can learn from one another by interrogating the affordances of mental and audiovisual intensification for understanding how humanity comes to terms with time and mortality. On a more speculative note, it also asks whether cinema is itself a manifestation of the Geschwind Syndrome or of the desire to transcend the looming end of our mortal perception."