In Transfer of Attention a crumbling handmade facsimile of a golden beet is held against the sky in place of and in opposition to the sun. Over the course of the video I use my hands as surrogates for the viewers desire to touch and understand a distant object, investigating the slowly disintegrating calcium carbonate sun until nothing remains but the traces of yellow dust. In this video and my practice in general I am interested in investigating the space between what your mind can fathom and what your body can perceive and produce, the distance between the feeling of a rock and the knowledge of a mountain. Placing my hands directly on the objects is a small effort to close the gap between the viewer and the vastly unattainable, and yet there still remains distance as the objects are obscured from the viewers eye by the act of touching itself. In Transfer of Attention the object is completely worn away, disappeared by the act of attempting to gain information through touch, only to reappear again and again, a slightly different form against a slightly different sky. – RS
