ERASED

Erased is a unique project that engages C.T. Jasper’s interests in the workings of cinematic narrative while also challenging the role of the art gallery. Occupying not only the gallery space but also the gallery’s office and staff room, this installation becomes the site of a video and sound exhibition that utilizes—and alters one’s experience of—preexisting footage from cinema. The main gallery space hosts a two-channel video installation in which Jasper has performed interventions on two cult movies: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (1979). Though the videos displayed retain their original locations and interiors, the artist has removed all the characters, digitally erasing them from the footage. What remains are austere, desolate shots that possess a haunting stillness; from empty corridors to a table set for dinner, here the set and architecture become the protagonists. The audio component of the installation is no less important, emitted from speakers propped up on cardboard boxes. As with the visual erasure of the characters, their dialogue has also been removed, leaving behind ambient sounds—footsteps, knocking, the creaking of an opening door—interrupted by occasional bursts of music or incomprehensible shouts. These altered soundscapes work to further heighten the viewer’s sense of estrangement. A third video in the exhibition is screened separately in the gallery’s staff room and presents looped footage from Stanley Kramer’s 1959 post-apocalyptic drama On the Beach. In Erased, film space and gallery space are made to become one, something between an empty cinema, a deserted film set location and a gallery. By stripping landmark works of American and European cinema of their audiovisual layers, Jasper doesn’t so much dissect the structure of a film itself, as he does the entire cinematic experience—laying bare the way in which we make sense of what we see and hear.