Screen Projects: Phil Hastings
Phil Hastings, Sua Cancroma, 2017. Video, 7:20 minutes.
Sua Cancroma is part of Phil Hastings’ The Threshold Series—video works that explore “liminal states using abstract and poetic forms.” In this series, Hastings’ treats digital programming as biological data, where slight variations at the level of the pixel—the DNA of his work—can produce new, yet related visual effects. Thus emphasizing chance and possibility. In Sua Cancroma, the tumescent opening seduces the eye even as it reddens, swells, blanches, and repulses. Rhythmic and cyclical, the orifice opens—a threshold—to frame a void full of potential yet chillingly empty. It makes us feel something liminal. We want to watch, we want the matter to heal, but we also want to look away, we want it to be over. Like a cancerous, misbehaving body, Sua Cancroma is too random for comfort, too mesmerizing to look away. It puts us uneasily and uncertainly at the threshold of being healthy and being ill.
To see more of Phil Hastings’ work and other works dealing with illness and disease, please visit Ill at Ease: Dis-ease in Art on view in the Department of Art Gallery (CFA B45) from April 13 – May 12, 2017.