ART32 - Introduction to Digital Video Adolfo Pardo Fake Fruit Fact ory, Chick Strand (1981/85)
The Sexuality Underneath
The beauty of the close-up framing is in hiding all the things that appear around the beauty our eye always desires. In her work, Chick Strand moved her camera towards those moments that caught her attention, “ when I look at people, when I film them, it's the aesthetic that I notice” she said in an interview with Irena Leimbacher in 1997. Her aesthetic was based on the appreciation of those little details which used to obsess her and took her to deeper questions. Which is the truth behind the scenes? What happens withinthatgroupofwomen?In FakeF ruitFactory,Strandopensthroughherlensethis place in which there is so much more
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On the opposite of Soft Fiction, in which Strand brings the testimony of a group of women about sex through one storyline, in Fake Fruit Factory she approaches a group of women by reading through the lines of their actions and conversations. An special perspective in which the relation between image, audio and music plays a key role in revealing what it is underneath the surface. Naive conversations reveal the double meaning of her hands making one and another fruit or vegetable. They want love, money, freedom. Three big “ideals” that the American boss can provide them. Even though he is already taken, they all move around him and between comments such as “ he is my kind of guy”, jealousy comes out. The end seems to be happy, the American left two weeks after that, his Mexican wife holds the factory, she is rich and she travels throughout Europe as free as a dove in the …show more content…
At this point I wonder what is the limit between reality and our own perspective, in this case Strand’s, is capable of creating. From a smart approach to thing, we can make big speeches. This reflection makes me bring a document that concludes this short review over her trajectory. It is a short autobiography that Chick Strand sent to the artist Caroline Koebel in 1994. Her unique and intimate life is summarized in a few words, one short speech that could have turned into one of her videos: time in short frames of video