You are lured into seeing the place, except it’s no longer a place.
It’s a scene, a point of interest.
The landscape of Monument Valley, Arizona, recognizable from its frequent use as a backdrop in western movies, TV commercials, magazine ads and on postcards, is explored in the first person singular by the video camera-eye. It is inscribed with another set of media-saturated images: footage from the Apollo moon shots. Layers of voice and sound mediate these two territories of image recognition, narrating and locating them in a mythic past of public and private memory. There – and only there—can the experience of these places and events be re-entered and authenticated.
SIRENSONG premiered in Halifax in the fall of 1987 as a video installation work at the Centre for Art Tapes. The following year the installation was shown at Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, and the single channel videotape premiered at the Images Festival in Toronto.
Read (IN)SCRIPT — Manuscript of an essay about the making of the tape SIRENSONG.