Tonight

2008-2010 | Single channel video installation | 16 minutes, loop

At first glance, Tonight looks like a still portrait of a family staring at the spectators, their gaze released from the confines of one domicile and into another space, as in Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas. However, one begins to slowly notice a series of blocks of color, lines, and distortions forming and disappearing into the image, creating an air of dramatic tension through their abstract operations. This work is highly personal since one of the main themes of the family portrait is the absence of the father figure. It extends the loss of the artist's own father into the territory of fiction. Tonight is also a statement on the fragility of the family as an institution and the manners in which familial intimacy can be breached.