Joshua Sutari

Today I thought about you (2020)

Moving image

 

My artworks are the product of my imagination and lifestyle. Everything that I depict in my work is followed by an emotional experience, emotional in a sense where I have lost people as part of growing up, had my heart broken as part of growing up, and living with the fear of being alone in life. These emotions help me, welcome people, into space where I can tell them a story of a 22-year-old coping with the uneasiness that comes along when you lose someone you love, the hardship to move forward and find joy in newfound independence. Being young and in love compels you to be lost in translation, where you get lost in life so wonderfully surrounded by people that once you fall in and out of love you’re always standing a world apart. This could be interpreted as that feeling that comes around when you just start seeing someone and you just think about them but when things end there’s resentment towards them that comes with regrets of not being able to see them anymore but deeply care for them.

 

Today I thought about you is a final goodbye to a certain individual letting them know that at another time, in another place there would still be the same sense of affection and care towards them. The silence in the film creates a vivid image for us to understand the influence of resentment that comes during the process of moving forward leaving us to regret the decisions that were made. By having the beauty of silence speaking through the visuals, you can see the sense of regret and resentment acted out to present the final goodbye to that certain individual without any hopes of seeing them again but promising lifelong love.

 

The film is interested in inviting people into my struggles of living with anxiety that it instigates me to overthink about the idea of getting over someone but constantly remembering them and regretting losing them. Those struggles are depicted in a poem and that gave me the concept of using performance and poem to show strains of relationship, heartbreak, and fear of communication. The work consist of a poem that acts out as a letter which is found at certain parts of the film My poem is an important aspect of the work as it helps connect the beauty of silence with my visuals and through the words found in the poem comes to the sense of regret and resentment. Hence, why the poem is key in exploring the themes of regret and resentment through a silent tone. In terms of the installation, I invite people into my space to sit alongside my characters and spend time experiencing the resentment and regret that dwells upon the visuals that are being projected on a wall. To get people to understand those experiences, I left letters that read almost the same words portrayed in the visuals with some re-written sentences and errors to emphasize how frightened I am to say my final goodbye.