Burning Bush

“A virtuosic use of video sets this burning bush alight with crimson colour and transcendent allusions. “ – TIFF Wavelengths Series, 2010 “In Eastern Orthodoxy’ a tradition exists that the flame Moses saw was God’s Uncreated Energies / Glory , manifested as light, thus explaining why the bush was not consumed. Hence, it is not interpreted as a miracle in the sense of an event, which only temporarily exists, but is instead viewed as Moses being permitted to see these Uncreated Energies / Glory, which are considered to be eternal things; the Orthodox definition of salvation…” – New World Encyclopedia Burning Bush is made from a series of mid-fall shots of a bright “digital” red euonymus both in real time and with video time lapses. Much of the ideas for the piece emerged during post-production. The Euonymus mid-fall “natural” leaves are startling, their colors are so saturated as to appear unreal, their purity so uniform as to appear manufactured. It has long been a fascination of mine to activate shared qualities living in parallel universes; always, that which is present in the make up of the digital cinema image and that of the physical world it is representing. Assumptions we make about the real world, the way it is recorded, or more appropriately translated, are cultural constructs. The biblical references about the Burning Bush are man made poetic as well as insitutional constructs. – VG