Statement about the work

My Person in the Water is the latest segment of Leighton Pierce’s ‘precipitated narratives’ series. The multi-channel installations and single channel videos in this series engage the fringes of the viewer’s narrativizing attention by creating a temporal experience that is emotionally transformative without ever engaging in storytelling or defaulting to pure abstraction. He does not rely on identification with the emotions of a character, the flow of plot, or the apprehension of a particular conceptual foundation. Rather, it is the fragility of the viewer’s own emotional associations as they interact with the flow of images and sounds that is his material. He engages the senses as fully as possible as a gateway to the viewers’ curiosity and emotional imagination/memory. The single channel video, My Person in the Water, will be reconfigured as an element of Convection a 6 channel video/sound installation commissioned by Cornell College (Iowa), opening in January 2007. My Person in the Water engages the desire for merge among the knowledge of separateness. A woman moving in the water and the gaze of a man, both seen from beneath the surface are elaborated by the vectorizing force of sound, pulling the viewer deeper.