2012
HD video
35 mins 27 secs

A jumble of letters in the centre of the frame slowly detangles from impenetrable inertness to the legibility of words: The fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The letters refuse to hold their ordered pattern, as if knowing the meaning of the phrase they depict, quickly fleeing to the edges, scattering traces. On the heels of these disbanded pixels are more words that read: an incomplete work in three parts. Alice Wang’s video, mirroring her title sequence, moves from densely layered history to shared memories unpacking this history, to the dispersal of meaning across the frame of the moving image, calling into question the construction of sight, and consequently how the past read through memories remains fleeting.

—Erik Martinson