Orlando, 2018, HD video and sound. 13 min
Orlando is an experimental video that depicts a wake in the childhood home of two brothers, set along a family pool in Orlando, Florida. The video presents glimpses of intimate conversations and distant observations, offering a fragmented personal portrait of Orlando that pivots around the outskirts of Cape Canaveral, the Pulse Night Club, and Sunday sermons at a drive-in church. This despondent wandering through a place depicts a shifting social landscape and the identities it shapes. Orlando looks to how the affect of loss is refracted on the surface of water, and how mourning can resemble submersion. It presents a visual vocabulary for family and its absence, and reflects on mass shootings as a symptom of national illness, the extinction of swamp species, roadside wonders, and new beginnings.
Ohan Breiding works with photography, video, installation and collaboration to reinterpret historical events, putting the past into a meaningful transformative relation with the present, and giving voice and ground to underrepresented and marginalized communities. Their practice is committed to representing subjects that are marked “deviant” or illegible, and to experiment with forms of world-making that offer an alternative to state-sanctioned legitimation, and gendered and racialized hierarchies. Breiding attended Scripps College, the Glasgow School of Art, and received thier Masters from CalArts. They have exhibited at LAXART, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland. They are a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Originally from a small village in Switzerland, Breiding currently lives and works in New York and teaches at Williams College, Massachusetss.
http://johannabreiding.com