Where I am from there is no horizon. The close hills and veiling trees contain your vision in a viscous, intricate texture. The dense terrain coddles you. For some, it smothers.
Out West, out of my element, I feel exposed. But the desert's emptiness, its succinct horizon, clarifies thought. Space laid bare seems to make time stand still. How is my identity structured by my native landscape? How tied am I to the land, subconsciously?
Night Cast is part one in a three-part series of videos that explores the relationship between people and their native landscape. The structure of Night Cast uses the strategies of popular reality and documentary programs that portray rural people. Like a documentary observer, I film the outdoorsmen while they hunt through the woods, then I interview them about their experiences. Night Cast diverges from the reality show/documentary approach and avoids realistic narratives that are often a conduit for oversimplified representation, or stereotyping, of a subject. Night Cast inquires into the abstract nature of these men's experiences and thoughts, where vulnerability rests comfortably with masculinity. Their familiar landscape is likewise abstracted to create a groundless dark stage intermittently pierced by theatrical light.
The Green World is a term used to describe the settings of Shakespeare's plays where the human relationship to nature is an important theme. In Mid-Summer Night's Dream, ones in the green world, characters leave behind the constraints of reality and are liberated to explore new, transformative ways of seeing and being. Characters find escape from the practical narratives of civilized existence. Night Cast examines characters in a transformed narrative set in the not-so-green world. It is not mid-summer, but mid-winter. Our character's soliloquy is not about the comical strategies of love, but the vulnerable and dark corners of masculinity.
– JW