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Grant Stevens
Turtle Twilight II
2006 – 2011
three-channel digital video, 4:00 / 10:57 minutes
Grant Stevens’ video works are distinctive as interventions into the language and aesthetics of
filmic, popular and online cultures. He recontextualises the familiar by directly
appropriating found text and moving image (notoriously including blockbuster films),
offering glimpses of profound insight amongst his studies of banality. In the three-channel
video installation
Turtle Twilight II
Stevens mines the contemporary online phenomenon of
holiday blogging. Originally a two-channel piece with English text, the work was developed
for
Light from Light
with the addition of a third channel containing Chinese translations. In
the centre channel, a kitsch image of a beach sunset suggests we are being taken to a tropical
island destination, but also flags that the precise location is not so relevant – it is instead the
timeworn island holiday of the popular imagination. The image is flanked by a text narrative
lifted from an anonymous blogger’s beach-side holiday experiences, the highlight being turtles
at sundown. The imagery, sensations and insights described are, perhaps for both Western and
Chinese audiences, familiar to the point of cliché.
There is always an uneasiness surrounding Stevens’ repurposing of others’ intimate sentiment.
On the one hand, the text used in this video piece is already in the public domain; in posting
their diaristic reflections online, the author submits to share with a broader audience. On the
other hand, however, the exaggerated mode of public display in the library or museum context
confers to audiences an unshakeable sense of voyeurism. Further complicating the matter, this
new context also confers to the author’s own sentiments a charge of inauthenticity – a
dismissal of their lived experiences as cliché, archetype or copy.
Turtle Twilight II
thus
epitomises private experience in the age of public online identity. The author’s narrative is
viewed through the frame of our collective and individual projections of the tropical holiday
experience, as much as the author’s own experience was always already framed by these
projections.
