Micah Stansell, installation view of The Water and the Blood, 2011. Photo courtesy the artist.

In her 1981 essay, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway describes various dualities that disintegrate in contemporary society, particularly the distinction between organisms and machines as we use more and more technologies to augment our bodies (including pacemakers, prosthetics, and hearing aids).

Be it via photographs, hard drives, smart phones, or digital clouds, we have become increasingly accustomed to supplementing our memories and knowledge banks with technologies that can store and access information for us. Regardless of the improvement that technology used as prosthesis affords, our memories remain fragile and fragmented collections whose gestalt is a fiction. Further, memory is fluid: its constant reorganization of information functions to stabilize our social and psychological identities by reworking discontinuities into logical narratives. Micah Stansell’s The Water and the Blood delivers a Southern brand of postmodern film that works to disassociate the linearity of the artist’s own piecemeal recollection, and exploit the operation of memory as something less than comprehensive.

Micah Stansell, still from The Water and the Blood, 2011. Still courtesy the artist.

Stansell achieves this through the use of a semilinear narrative divided across a multichannel video installation. Eight large scale projections completely fill the facade of three walls in Gallery 1 of the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. As with many of Stansell’s works, the viewer is implicated in the process of creation and interpretation by having to choose, via the orientation of the body, which imagery to see at any given time.

In an interview with the artist, I tried to better understand the details of the story being told, but in line with Roland Barthes idea of a “writerly text”, Stansell was hesitant to delineate the exact plot of his work. Instead, he “allow[s] the viewer to participate as an editor, constructing a narrative from… the eight available screens.” Nevertheless, “the work is broken up into scenes, and there is a structured movement between those scenes” which guides the viewer to an understanding of the narrative. (My emphasis added.) In this sense, the viewer isn’t completely free of direction from the artist, suggesting that our memories and their recollection may be shaped not only by our personal experience, but also the will of others. For example, photographs of us as young children often stand as romanticized memories of times in our lives that we hardly remember.

Micah Stansell, installation view of The Water and the Blood, 2011. Photo courtesy the artist.

Visually, the use of nostalgic costuming and setting in The Water and The Blood could be seen as sentimentalist, but aside from being time appropriate to the artist’s actual memory, Stansell frames the use of these period elements as a means for creating “a very concrete relationship with memories,”—a relationship in which “the idealized version of the past is consistently subverted (or at least tempered) by a revelation of pain or difficulty that is usually the center of the story.” Stansell says that in much of his work this “center” is often an “absence.” As Barthes would have it, absence is an opening where infinite possibilities for interpretation can occur. In Stansell’s work, it is a space for us to insert our memories in order to complete the narrative.

As intriguing as the completion of the original narrative may be, the model of contemporary memory proposed by Stansell holds an equal or elevated status. In our interview he said he was, “especially thinking about how memory functions in the age of the photo album and home movie, where a memory of an event (in whatever state it may have existed) is replaced by a memory of a photograph of that event.” Reminiscent of Doug Aitken’s work, in The Water and The Blood we see this played out in picturesque moments where the subject is essentially still, framed by his or her equally static environment. The subtle movement of the subject and setting suggests that in our memory, fixed documents like photographs can come to life.

Micah Stansell, still from The Water and the Blood, 2011. Still courtesy the artist.

Peppered throughout the 27-minute loop, the viewer is given clues on where to look based on which of the three discreet, yet ingeniously synced, audio tracks available he or she chooses to listen to. The main audio track, which is a sparse and ethereal score, plays over a loudspeaker. Two other audio tracks, which include dialogue, speak through a pair of headsets from which the viewer may chose one at a time. The video acts as a fluid constellation of memories floating in one’s head, while the audio functions as an analogue of consciousness, alerting us to which memories are important in the re-creation of history; the former points to the objects of memory, the latter its subject(s). It is in the play of these elements that Stansell’s work moves from the diegetic process of telling a narrative to the memetic process of showing how memory works.

Stansell’s work suggests that our memories are not always completely ours, and invites us to insert ourselves into his memories by providing illustrious tropes with which to empathize (especially if one is from the Southeast): A group of young people enjoy a slightly tawdry camping and swimming trip; a young boy and girl tromp through a quintessentially Georgian landscape; a young woman stands listlessly in what could be her part-time job at a laundry mat; a young man engages in the duties and labors that solidify his manhood; an older gentleman pushes through his days, with no parallel or partner. By giving us so many characters with whom to relate, we are allowed to choose one, become him or her, and partake in the recollection.

Regardless of which choose-your-own story the viewer selects, Stansell’s exhibition at MOCA GA exerts the artist’s prowess at capturing sensual imagery. His acute sense of timing and the technical mastery of his media allow the viewer to become fully immersed in the environment and the contingent story that the artist and viewer mutually produce.

Micah Stansell is one of the artists featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Working Artist Project program. Stansell’s show, The Water and the Blood, will remain up at MOCA GA through December 3, 2011.