Woffords, Paint-- video stills

This was a collaborative painting/performance/video with my sister Camille. It’s something of a continuation of my ongoing fixation with Gauguin’s South Pacific paintings, tropical paradise fantasias in general, the Return to Eden, and the romanticization of the primitive. It also seems to be about authorship, sibling rivalry, heritage, commoditization, consumption, and questionable nutrition. The two of us, in our matching Wofford College hoodies, workpants and sneakers, work on a large painting in a sort of faux-primitive jungle genre, reminiscent of Rousseau or Kahlo: it's a half-finished double portrait of the two Woffords, dressed in the aforementioned identical grey gear. We work on the painting for a very long time, then discover that the paint is edible. A paint-eating frenzy ensues, we collapse and pass out, and the painting finishes itself while we’re unconscious. Not to give anything away.

While the video seems to work fine on its own, it's best experienced when the painting itself is nearby.