UWM Arts+Technology Night

Cairo Versus the Angels uses strange and abstracted archival imagery to represent the struggle to repress past memories. The concept emerged in part from a dream that I had years back. The dream involved a beetle who had crawled into my ear, who whispered to me sinister thoughts that I took thereafter to be the persuasion of my depression. From then on, for many years, I was in a constant battle to subdue the whispers of the beetle, Cairo, to barricade his perpetual words of a traumatic past.

So too the video portrays his birth and emergence, his entrance into the man’s mind, and the human’s struggle to keep the devious Cairo at bay. The video’s final segment uses women to represent the insects, as they are the lusty appeal of a prolonged mental depression, of it’s disquieted comfort and solitaire familiarity.

The enclosed space situates the viewer within the video’s aftermath, in a room destroyed by the ravages of the man’s fury, by the deceitful whispers of insects. The audio is found, manipulated, and captured, working as a subtle enhancement to the images.