Open this Door
a video by Sara Morley
3.5 minutes, 1992
This piece was created for an exhibition in 1993 at the VAV Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, in which I projected video onto a piece of raw silk that hung in the middle of a large, blackened, light-proof space. The moving image was caught on the silk—which moved with the air currents—and shone through to the opposite wall. I filmed myself moving in front of a stationary, early black and white Betamax camera. The audio track is a drastically edited version of my grandmother describing one of her recurring dreams. My goal was to see how far I could obscure the image, using very primitive video technology, and how far I could strip the narrative to a bare minimum and still have it make sense.