HD video with sound; 8 minutes, 24 seconds.
Negative Capability started from the soundtrack: an audio-collage, which Vainsencher created out of recordings of conversations with her mother, a Uruguayan psychoanalyst who lives in Israel, over the course of one year. She cut and rearranged her mother's words, sometimes creating a new sentence out of many disparate ones, sometimes leaving whole minutes untouched. She even made a song out of her mother's “ehh”s and “uh”s. What remains is a monologue that turned out to be equally about her mother's process as an analyst and her own process as an artist. The title of the work refers to the words the English poet John Keats used to describe Shakespeare's ability to inhabit the minds of characters so disparate and far from his own. The psychoanalytical theorist Wilfred Bion borrowed Keats' phrase to describe the analyst's single most important ability—to be able to exist in a state of not-knowing, in order to arrive at a deeper understanding. Vainsencher joins this chain by pointing out the importance of this same ability in the creative process.
HD video, silent; 9 minutes, 48 seconds.
Duet features Leslie Satin, a dancer, choreographer, and professor at New York University. Satin and Vainsencher met at Yaddo in 2009 and have worked together on several projects since. To make this work, Vainsencher positioned her camera on a tripod in front of Satin, and started swiveling it from side to side, in a panning shot. She asked Satin to move her head from side to side, like a slow-motion “no”, always in opposition to the direction in which the camera on the tripod was swiveling. The result is a slightly sea-sickness-inducing duet. The work seems to be in a repetitive loop, but in fact, each repetition is cut closer to the end of the single-shot work, so that with each iteration Satin is closer to finishing her movement. The very last iterations are only a few seconds long. Continuing the themes of Negative Capability, Satin's solemn refusal suggests a negation, while both the shaking of the head and the panning of the camera follow the arc of a semicircle. Combined, the two might make a complete circle, but instead they draw attention to the empty space between the performer and the lens.
HD video with sound; 10 minutes.
The process for Leslie Across the Floor started from Vainsencher's encounter with Leslie Satin, a dancer and choreographer who studied with Merce Cunningham and teaches at New York University. In this work Vainsencher explores a parallel between video and dance: entrances and exits. Both the traditional dance stage and the cinematic frame have edges which one must exit and enter. These points of entry and departure also stand in for the narrative's edges: the beginning and the end. To create the choreography for this video, Vainsencher asked Satin to improvise a movement which was an entrance that turns into an exit. Satin laid on her back and Vainsencher laid down on her stomach with the camera at floor-height to shoot Satin entering then leaving the frame, like a worm inching in reverse. The second phase in the process happened in Vainsencher's studio, where she replaced the video's soundtrack. Instead of the sound of a soft body being pushed/dragged across a polished wood floor, she recorded, in synchronicity with Satin's movements, the sound of what she imagined Richard Serra's sculptures—which are made of forged steel and weigh many tons—would sound like when dragged across an industrial cement floor.
HD video with sound, 45 second loop.
Here It Comes began with a short video of gentle waves which Vainsencher had shot on the shallow end of a beach in Le Havre, France. She replaced the sounds of the ocean with a soundtrack made by recording her own voice whispering two overlapping sentences, repeated many times: “Here it comes” and “It’s coming.” Vainsencher aimed to make a replica of the ocean's sounds with her voice, evoking something between anticipation and anxiety. For the artist, it would be “ridiculous” to feel these emotions in front of such a calm sea, but as she points out, isn't the internal landscape always more powerful than the external one?