©️2025 Claire Bain
Link to video https://vimeo.com/1121696492
Artist Statement
Claire Bain
Title: Friends 3
Medium: Video, color, sound, 5 minutes
Creative Process
This five-minute piece of video art is intended to be an experience, and not a product. It is intended to be watched with attention. The story here is about friendship and the connected experience of human beings with each other, and with natural things like light, animals, plants, sky, clouds. This is an invitation to you to have the will to look at another person and smile, and maybe say hello. It might be different to do that where you're living, or might be quite common if you have the good fortune of living among other human beings who are comfortable being friendly.
The visual elements of this video are people and color. In the first half, people appear as figures and faces; color occurs in sky and nature, in paper discs which I painted and floated in water, and in fabric. I used the long-standing technique of chroma keying to make selected colors transparent and layer footage to unite the imagery behind the main figure of Alfred Hernández as he journeys towards us, the viewers. Andy Burns's face appears briefly, as do I. The red garment I wear is chroma keyed over to tie the layered first half to the second half's gaze held on a large sunflower. There are two bees working on the face of the flower, its circular shape, spiral lines and crescents echoing the shapes created in the first half.
The imagery in the first half is the autobiographical depiction of how we three friends who have been geographically separated remain in contact. We are film/video artists and have shared our work and collaborated with each other for over 30 years. We are also a fundamental part of each others' formation as artists and we are, through sheer will, maintaining our friendship however we can. We stay connected via phone calls and a continuing text stream of writing, photos, and recordings, much of which is sharing and conversation about our respective art practices.
The second half of the video is one sustained shot of a large sunflower with two bees on it. The bees come in and out of focus, but the edges of the sunflower remain sharp. This is an invitation to pay attention, to look around the edges of the sunflower, and not only at the drama of the two characters on the screen: the bees. They are occasionally joined by other bees, they fight, they collect pollen and nectar, enabling the sunflower to create food as seeds which perpetuate its species, and to feed many animals. They are just going about their lives - this is not like a blockbuster film where afterwards you talk to your friend and say, "Can you believe how those two bees were pollinating and collecting nectar? Wow! And then there was that one fight that happened with the bees that was just rad, dude!" No, this is a meditation, an invitation for you, when you go outside in nature and even around in your living space to just stop and notice things. The story here is the experience of natural things like light, like insects, like plants, like sky, like clouds, like the movements and interactions of other beings who are really not unlike human beings.
The soundtrack consists of a narration and sustained series of footsteps on unpaved ground as a real time reminder that we live on the Earth, that underneath the concrete there is soil and gravel and the earth itself. My narration was created during a walk through my neighborhood and relates the experience of moving through the community. The spoken narrative is an encouragement to uphold and grow the diminishing part of community: connection. Vocalizations were contributed by Andy Burns, and I added whistles to indicate the breath of people, like the silent wind moving the clouds.
I asked Alfred and Andy to send me video clips of themselves, and this video was a way for we three friends to be together in the same place, even if only as an idea in a work of media art. I wanted to put them in the space where I live, in my garden, my home life. This is also a memento, and a record of our decades of friendship and collaboration as artists. We're not unlike those bees, living together and apart, not relenting in our earnest pursuit of a meaningful and generous life.
The Covid pandemic created an era of remote connection between human beings (and a period of freedom for animals in the natural world), and has left a legacy of good and not so good: increased connection through digital media is a wonderful way that people come together, but the mediated communication has brought ways of unlearning socialization. The latter is sometimes a form of restrictive interaction that privileges text messaging, email, and other digital media over real-time spoken interactions, creating distance between people. In the case of we three friends, the text thread and internet media have upheld artistic continuity between us with an immediacy that helps us connect.
The triplets in Friends 3:
The human need for the experience of:
Nature,
Connection
Quiet focus.
Components:
Visual: nature, abstraction, people
Sound: footsteps, narration, vocalizations
Content: connection, movement, emotion
Cycles:
Life cycle
Water cycle
Movement cycle
Sounds:
Footsteps
Voice
Whistle
Shapes:
Circles
Crescents
Arcs
Nature:
Sky
Earth
Animals
The elements:
Earth
Air
Vapor
"Friends 3" narration
What if your plants and flowers decided to just start walking
around like we do? What if your neighbors were singing songs of love
and friendship to each other?
What if your friends who are far away, who were split like the
winds blown,
Were shown
the way back together?
What if there was harvest and sharing with no fighting?
What if there were ways of communicating that involved
Only the body? The bees know, and they fight and then they continue on.
And I've seen the birds do the same. What is that? Greed, pettiness, survival.
We don't know, what can we do? Just what we can. Just as much as we can.
We can float in circles. We can pull up colorful crescents.
We can crash our crowns down to the ground knowing that we don't need them. Nor that sound, the sound
of authority squishing us down, when really it means nothing. The dogs know better.
Listen,
Cute. The cicadas know better.
The wheel on the air conditioner turns and learns its analog
Voyage to the voices.
What if the dogs were communicating a message when you walk by? What if they were saying, hello, neighbor, I'm here.
You are here. We have muscles, blood, guts, bodies, veins, skin, hair, fur, brains.
And we learn and we love and we feel, and we think and we move and we…
Our analog muscles push blood and corpuscles from our heart to our feet, from our head
to the dread that is always there
lying in bed
or rolling around at the top of our head. Reality is what we see.
Reality is what we decide to see. Reality is what we decide to be.
©️2025 Claire Bain
