Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 2

Crush is the story of a man who wants to turn into an animal as told by the man himself, and one or two observers. He employs a variety of techniques to transform himself into a beast, including cutting off parts of his body, exercising, swimming; he wants to return to the water, to speed up evolution a little. Has he gone mad, or is he just tired of being human? As the narrator descends into private obsessions, we begin to perceive the distorted outlines of reason which guide his descent. The trajectory he defines allows us to reflect upon the correlations between the body and identity, our culture's obsession with the body beautiful, and what it means to be human.

This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 2.

"Over the course of one year, I periodically shot footage from the front window of my third floor apartment. This material became the basis of Window, a video about knowing. How do we come to know a place or a person? Through repetition and variations; our knowledge comes from more than one unique experience. It is the sum of many things. 'The sum of all sight and sound. The sum of all motion.' Window attempts to show how a whole can be more than merely the sum of the parts."

—Nelson Henricks

This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 2.

Handy Man examines the window as a site of voyeurism and surveillance. With his Hi-8 camera, Henricks documents two workers in his interior courtyard. The camerawork has a secretive and furtive feel, treating the male body as an erotic object. This footage forms the basis of a video which attempts to implicate the viewer in processes of exhibitionism and image fetishization. Handy Man is part of a trilogy of works exploring one of the principle metaphors of video: the window.

This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 2.

Using a Super-8 camera, Henricks employs time-lapse photography to document the interior and exterior of his apartment. Inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf, Time Passes uses writing as a metaphor for notions of temporality and impermanence.

This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 2.