Refusing the System: The Video Work of J.R. Uretsky CHRIS DAVIDSON
For J.R. Uretsky, art is birthed from failure: “The refusal of normative behaviors and beliefs creates space for innovation. Failure is not only the circumstance which brings us to this moment of refusal but also the banner we bear when we choose creativity over normativity.” Setting herself up for failure allows new things to be made. About her video pieces, she says, I [don’t know] a lot about technology, nor do I care a lot about it, and so I’m already working within a system that’s going to fail. Once I realize the system isn’t working, I have this moment of refusing the system. In that there’s space for me to make something new and something innovative, something weird. This process plays out in Uretsky’s work both materially and thematically. Fort (2:35) opens on a lined, yellow texture, faintly backlit. The texture appears to breathe. Are we looking at a microscopic view of human tissue? The camera rocks, as if to break inertia, before pulling back, silently, through a landscape of varying materials. Eventually, we see another, living texture amid the quilted cloth, hanging foam, tarpaulin, broom, and tape: human legs. There’s a person in there. As the camera continues outward, we see that the legs are suspended like the boy’s in The Giving Tree . The rest of the body is hidden.
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