Michael Stickrod
b. 1978
Like all good family home movies, Michael Stickrod’s videos principally portray generational relations. Yet unlike their vernacular alter egos, Stickrod’s movies never simply preserve precious family memories for future recollection (although they function perfectly well in this regard). Rather the primary memories documented in these videos are typically long past the moment of filming and what is represented is oftentimes the act of recollection itself, registered through layers of mediation. Again and again technologies of recording and playback appear alongside loved ones, suggesting a possible parallel between generations of media and family. Through their extended meditation on transmission—whether first-person narratives recounted to the artist, old audio cassettes rescued from the attic, or the act of painting portraits or transforming “live shit” into potable water—Stickrod’s videos follow the cyclical routes between natural forces of life and death and the numerous artificial conduits that recycle and broadcast our living bodies back into a pre-assembled world, which is already in progress. Life, death, and the various circuits of transmission that connect the two stat…
Films