EKPHRASIS FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE
A review of Umbilical Hospital by Vi Khi Nao
AP2 Books
Vi Khi Nao, Umbilical Hospital
1913 Press
Paperback, 84 pages, November 2017
When I was a kid, my parents took me to visit relatives in Ireland. The main thing I remember about that time is the sheep: long car rides, misty ruins, fabulous nightmare-shaped cliffs, and the sheep, everywhere, like shabby sentient clouds. I watched them always, wondering what they knew about this place where they lived and I didn’t—if it occurred to them that it was beautiful. Did they know about green, I wondered, or just hunger and danger and sex?
Vi Khi Nao’s , a poetic ekphra sis of Leslie Thornton’s video installation “Sheep Machine,” tells me I didn’t quite get the question right. Why did I undertakes a similar projective maneuver, manipulating an ambient video of sheep grazing next to a cable-car tower into a kaleidoscopic mêlée of abstract color and form. “Sheep Machine,” part of Thornton’s series, consists of the two versions of the video, documentary and psychedelic, set next to each other in circular frames, as if viewed through binoculars. It is nearly impossible to follow the correlation between the measured movements on the left and the dance of shapes and colors on the right, which fluctuate wildly with each small movement of the film’s animal and inanimate subjects. Still, the viewer—dramatized as the speaker of Nao’s 2017 collection—can’t help but try to follow, to make sense of the relation between the profane flow of pastoral life and the eruptions of aestheticized sublimity it produces.
