Karen Reis

Colonial Drive 2018

Single-channel 4K, HD and iPhone, 16:9, 12’ colour, sound

Colonial Drive is a moving image work that uses architecture, psychoanalysis and posthuman thought as the main themes. The work uses the new suburbs¹ as one of the locations and subject for investigations on the psychological effects of being immersed in such environments. The identity and standardization of lifestyles that those places arouse, specialy in women. As contrast, Nature is present as a minimal fantasy, in the form of desire for escape and reconnection to the land, a dreamscape. The suburban surrealism and its campy architecture are part of an idea of suburbs being living ruins, a rich territory for narratives to be exposed. In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler talks about the anxieties of the unknowable frightening expansion of urban spaces of modern cities, giving rise to phobias associated with spacial fear.

He argues that the growth of urban space created external phantasmagoria such as buildings that were oppressing to the subject as well as vast derelict areas that were freighting (for example, empty parking lots) creating a ‘fear’ of the outside, and the desire to retreat at home, but home was an equally disturbed place as it generated a nostalgia for a sense of belonging. The work is a dream-like narrative that blurs fiction and documentary, presenting the thoughts of a female bodiless character immersed in such environment, the outdated suburb model, responsible for giving birth and perpetuating an utopian, script-like lifestyle.

Cinematography Kim Annan and Karen Reis
Original score Michael Prain Recording Nick Abbott

Shot on locations in Tongariro National Park, Raetihi, Taranaki, Auckland and Paris.

*Screener upon request

¹ The sprawling new suburbia, mass produced houses originated in America post-war that spread across continents till present times.

Love Cuts 2017

HD, 20’ colour, sound

Speculative short documentary that investigates love in the perspective of 4 people living in Auckland, New Zealand. Their thoughts are presented in an unaltered realism and intimate form of poetry, infused with anxieties and questions about the concept of love today.

Love Cuts