Here It Comes, 2014
HD video with sound
41 seconds
I made "Here It Comes" during my first year at Hunter's MFA program, while taking Constance DeJong's "Sound" class. Constance's classes were extremely popular and notoriously hard to get into, a feat which in my case required patience, tenacity, and a little bit of begging. She later became my thesis advisor, and a year after graduating from the program I included her in "I Can't Tell You Because I Can't Tell You", a group show about the treachery of narrative which I curated at 601 Artspace in the LES.
DeJong is one of those teachers whose voices stay in the back of your head forever after, helping you along when you're stuck in the studio, whether you're being too much of a perfectionist to actually get a piece finished or too lazy to do what it takes to make it right. She taught me to think about the sound in a video as a protagonist equal to the moving image, and one that can completely change the way a piece is interpreted by a viewer. She taught me to be free and wild in the early stages of a new creation, and also how to hone it in the final stages. Everyone should have a teacher like Constance. I'm not alone in thinking this. Whenever she has a performance or a show in the city, you can count on meeting multiple generations of her students, many of them like me are women making video, sculpture, sound, and everything in between. We're her supporters and fans, grateful students and collaborators.
This piece started as a simple exercise for class, which simply asked to replace a video's original sound with something else. I picked a short video of gentle waves which I shot a couple of years before on the shallow end of a beach in Le Havre, France. I replaced the sounds of the ocean with a soundtrack I made by recording my own voice whispering two overlapping sentences, repeated many times: "Here it comes" and "It's coming". I was trying to make a replica of the ocean's sounds with my voice, but also going for something between anticipation and anxiety. It's a ridiculous thing to feel in front of such a calm sea, but isn't the internal landscape always more powerful than the external one?
Gabriela Vainsencher
MFA ‘16
www.gabrielavainsencher.com/
www.vimeo.com/gabrielav
@gabriela_vainsencher
© the artist
