Milly Skellington
The Afterlife of All Possible Cinematic Experiences
“This piece is part of an ongoing series tracing the life cycles of visual phenomenologies directly dealing with film, and the way they exist with a secondary life after they are experienced. The series is a loose homage to the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler's 1971 project Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global, in which he 'intended to photographically document the existence of everyone alive.’
The Afterlife of All Possible Cinematic Experiences, 2021, Oil paint and colored pencil on canvas, 74 x 72 inches
The subject matter was chosen as a result of mediating a response in the way our lives are embedded with invisible language. Movies and various media have their first or primary life written as encoded text-based scripts, which are then packaged together for us to experience and decode in an illusionary form, making us forget that they are fictitious. In a sense, we are the summary of the fiction we consume, be it bibles, law, or a seasonal (and sensational) reality television show.
The secondary life (or afterlife) of a film refers to its past primary life when it's experienced, and how it lives on and transforms us. Because these fictions are based on linguistic scripts that we do not see but surely absorb, and the basis of language is arbitrary, we often find ourselves lost in translation. The series in which this piece belongs to is called Wir leben zwischen Anfang und Ende der Dinge (We Live in Between the Beginning and End of Things). We are born into this world full of preexisting language and fiction, much like between the beginning of one film and the next. Sometimes these fictions are remade, or even repeated.
Finally, the tertiary or third life of film (a moving picture if you will), is piecing together the life cycle of how after we consume them (primarily and secondarily), to then be reborn into a reanimated, painted still image. It is both a notation in that it is a recording, as well as a mediation between a more fitting distorted realism in conjunction to these phenomena (in the Cubist sense of the painting's fractal reconstruction), and our societal preconceived idea of film.”