- Artist
- Metahaven
- Title
- The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)
- Year
- 2024
- Duration
- 30 min
- Format & Technical
Single-channel digital film / video
- Copyright METAHAVEN
| The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object), Metahaven’s latest film work, uses essayistic, fictional, and logical motifs and patterns—including palindromes, words and phrases which read the same backward as forward—to materialize its imaginative take on a 2022 poetry collection by Eugene Ostashevsky. The film builds on Metahaven’s earlier moving image works, like Hometown (2018) and Chaos Theory (2021), investigating joy, absurdism, truth claims, and childhood. “The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)” follows protagonist One listening to Ostashevsky’s verse. Words, sentences, idioms, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized across historical backgrounds. One, in her turn, talks with Companion, a quirky assistant prone to mistakes, and holds Red, a plush toy red panda and transitional object, “affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated.” [Sianne Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting,” 2012]. In so doing, in this film work, feeling is materialized whilst facing a new language to describe it. |
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