Quest for Resolve

Single Channel Video Installation (UFVA 2024 version). Click below to access interactive component.

Quest for Resolve by HCHawkins

Quest for Resolve is a work of video art thirteen years in the making.

A different video occupies each quadrant of the frame. All but one is edited linearly preserving the progression of actions in the sequence. The outlier is the first video filmed, the catalyst for the performance ritual. It begins with full-bodied movement and ends in retreat. In the other videos, the primary movement vocabulary is deconstructed transforming into restorative, meditative motion reflecting the texture of the natural environment.

Working with collage, montage, duplication, and juxtaposition,

the audience is invited into the process of meaning making as an active participant. They are given structural clues to perceive narrative while each repeating loop invites a re-frame of their experience. Extended viewing of the installation allows the visitor to collect clues and unearth details of an experience uniquely built by their own attention and commitment of time. The audience becomes the real-time editor of their own experience.

Screenshot from Quest for Resolve

Heather Coker Hawkins is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines the vocabularies of dance and cinema to translate ideas into action. The works take the shape of screendance, live performance, and installation. She uses personal experience focusing on relationships and the experience of living in a human body that feels pain, does not fit, and is searching for something just out of reach. All works are a confrontation of self and embodied histories conjuring a contemporary feminist gaze while decolonizing the dance history living in her rigidly trained body.

This work of video art marks the first collaboration with Hedy Hurban, composer of electronic/electroacoustic music and designer of costumes. Hedy designs costumes for opera and composes music for short and feature-length films and television. Her interest in interlacing sonic and digital art with traditional folk performance practices led her to create a prototype body instrument inspired by the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey called Dervish Sound Dress (2018) that combines music, wearable body technology and live performance.

The following are samples of the project in its development throughout 2023-2024. Beginning as a visual triptych, (I still consider the project a triptych) it is now four videos playing simultaneously in a quadrant.