Kim Pieters

sleepwalk (2009)

15 min 57 secSingle channel / Digital Video / Black & White / Sound

sleepwalk is shot in black and white and the camera moves around a room, showing silhouetted figures and pictures and mirrors hanging on the walls. As in Pieters' other moving image works, the footage is blurred and slowed, and obscures any detail about the depicted people or place. The pace and fuzzy visuals of this work reflect its title—there is a sense of being half asleep, or being half aware of something that is happening in another room.

sleepwalk is the name of a track by the band Flies inside the Sun. Over the course of the work, the sound moves from spacious, slow-paced guitar, bass, and drums to a fuller, feedback-fuelled sound, with a female vocal singing.

"This film carries an enormous personal load that goes back decades. The image and the sound are, as is usual with my work, found. Chosen for their evocations. Sexual tensions are played out in both genres and create a poignant reverie that does not need the charge of the earlier memories to explode its stories. However the lyric to Sleepwalk written by Peter Stapleton and sung by Pieters may deliver for the viewer another layer of sense."

Artist's statement

sleepwalk

silence cut to size
I only have eyes
I sleepwalk to your lies
but you are mine

sunsets on the screen
in a last electric dream
the sky is tangerine
but you are mine.

sleepwalk goes too far
we smile in simulacra
you take my breath away
and you are mine.

Other works by Kim Pieters

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