christine collins
I may have to see YOU again, Charlie

‘I may have to see YOU again, Charlie’, is a new sound installation developed for the NSPS.

Constructed entirely from dialogue appropriated from film, this sound piece focuses on the dialogue of a single actor. The actor, in character, seems to play every kind of hero in every kind of film - the historical epic, the biblical epic, the western, the war film, the disaster film, adventure film, film noir and science fiction. He plays the ‘real’ and the fictional. He plays Marc Antony, Moses, Ben Hur, John the Baptist, Buffalo Bill and Michelangelo. He holds every kind of army rank and has enemies ranging from ‘injuns’, sultans and Egyptians to Friesians and apes. For the work, his voice has been collected and isolated from 12 original films and his statements are arranged in a linguistic rather than filmic or narrative order. All of the of plots, landscapes, companions, enemies and lovers mingle as they are subordinated to a rhythmic alphabetical order of ‘I’ statements and ‘you ‘ statements, separated into two audio tracks.

In the work, the audience is placed between the two tracks playing simultaneously: situated between the excised and disembodied voices as he articulates himself and his other (s), they sit somewhere between the man and the character and his construction of himself and themself.

Presented in the noelsheridan projectspace.

catalogue essay

review by Ken Bolton