“Waterfall”
In Waterfall, Sadé presents 15 intimately scaled videos of running water. She filmed the river from her train window, as she rode along New England’s waterways. In the work Sadé turns the river’s horizontal orientation 90 degrees, shifting river’s axis vertically, and thereby abstracting the natural landscape. The river’s motion and that of the train blur the images further. The river cascades down the wall, rather than running along it, taking on the visual properties of a waterfall. Sadé further stylizes the work through her use of artificial coloration, which visually references her larger body of work.
Regarding her oeuvre, Sade says: My video stills arrest time and memory. My work aims toward a contemplation of time as a perfect metaphor for its own transcendence, which leaves us with a deepened awareness of our own motion toward mortality.In sets of stills taken from a video recorded on a train and car journey I resolve to remember as if the past were new, as if this journey remained a part of consciousness, as of course it does in our memory.
Through my visual studies I cultivate the thought that we never remain still because we are part of a flux that is omnipresent and affects all things, both the mind and the objects it is composed of. Such a consciousness permits us to meditate on the cyclic nature of our own existence. Art transforms what it is able to imagine. -Shuli Sade
