A Thing Least Like Eternity | Irish Artist's Film Index

A Thing Least Like Eternity

Day Magee


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Artist's biography

Day Magee

Contributors

Day Magee - Writer, Performer, Director

Lora Mauricio - Special Effects Makeup & Prosthetics

Mark Bergin - Piano, Sound Mixing

Description

-Shortlisted for the 2021 RDS Visual Arts Awards- ‘The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time - for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.’- CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters My work concerns futurity, specifically queer futurity, and here a euphemistic rebirth of my own temporality, but one informed by our collective recent past and any future that may be prospected from it. A performed video image of the artist housed inside a skull, having given birth to themselves, looped in an eternal moment. The work invokes Lee Edelmann’s theories of the Child, the queer death drive, and futurity in lieu of the heteronormative reproductive paradigm. The artist posits the viral potential of visualising their subjectivity as its own form of progeny, the conception of one’s experience its own creation myth. The piece owes its title to CS Lewis’ epistolary novel, chronicling the exchange between two generations of demons, or in this case, two generations of the self. The work continues Magee’s practice of self-mythology and image-making, drawing upon their childhood as a queer person under fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity and the development of chronic pain. It explores the death worship and eroticism at the heart of religious thinking. Magee is concerned with the ways in which one’s story acts as a unit of temporal measurement, measuring experience and absence/loss in the performance of images.

Screenings

  • 2021 — "Rally" at Limerick School of Art & Design
Details
Title

A Thing Least Like Eternity

Year

2021

Tags
emotions, humankind, philosophy, surrealist
Language

English

Duration

00:05:02

Original formats

Digital 4k

Screening formats

Digital 4K

Aspect ratio

16:9

Colour

Black & White

Supported by Kildare County Council Arts Service, and Visual Artists Ireland.
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