Welcome to the Enclave
4K video animation
12 minutes
2023
“Welcome to the Enclave” is an experimental animation framed as an absurdist crowdfunding video. The Enclave is a virtual neighborhood for ‘like-minded women’ created by Moni Calivione during the Covid pandemic. At the moment, she’s under attack from Reddit trolls who are changing her road signs to potty humor and splattering her walls with sexually explicit imagery. Together with her sister Blair, she desperately looks for a way to save her patch of e-serenity by raising money online. The film is a delirious exploration of technological “progress” that paints the metaverse as one large opportunity for chaos. A compendium of design flaws, errors, glitches, and oddities unravel the delusion at the heart of The Enclave’s pursuit for a white, suburban ideal and expose the baggage we bring to online spaces if we don’t fix our very real IRL problems.
There is a parallel between how a culture values women and how it values nature. Cast as a long-time supporting actress, backdrop, and accessory to man’s narrative of exploration and conquest, Nature has been categorized, contained, pruned and groomed to satisfy aesthetic cravings and support an American mythology. Categorization is never neutral and is defined to cater to the categorizer. My work connects the colonial gaze upon a landscape to the patriarchal control over female-identifying bodies and looks at how fantasy, simulation, and alter-cenes support both the processing and avoidance of difficult realities.
Through the rise and fall of visual verisimilitude in my highly-composited images, I aim to expose cracks and pathways in and out of our current socio-political moment. The myth of American exceptionalism hinges on the exploitation of the continent’s natural resources, disenfranchising of its native inhabitants, and the use of enslaved people as capital. White women both benefit from and are oppressed by these mythologies. It’s our responsibility to confront and dismantle whiteness in effort to be better allies, yet whiteness is slippery. Defined not by what it is but by what it is not – the racialized other – it hinges on the other to exist while simultaneously erasing the other from existence. A double-bind is also present in gender expectations and biases, and these conundrums of power pervade my work. How to hear the voice of the dominated in the archive of the dominant? How to resist objectification while working within the objectified frame?
In response, my films adopt a more feminine film form, valuing non-linear, sensorial experience over conventional, dialogue-driven narrative, and I use individual subjectivity to illuminate broader social issues. While my projects are conceptually rigorous, my filming process is highly intuitive and collaborative. I shoot alone with my subjects, without crew or assistants. Through this intimate working method, I create trust, openness, and equal partnership with the performers in my work. The camera follows their improvised performances, and we find the film together by framing and reframing this spontaneous action. I also make solo films, which are a collaboration between only the camera and me. The intimacy of these on-set collaborations persist even as I weave a structure into the film through the editing and visual effects. Green screen compositing allows for a final layer of collaboration in which isolated performers engage with simulated environments, triangulating the viewer, performer, and nature in intimate distance.
Sarah Lasley is a video artist from Louisville, Kentucky and an Assistant Professor of Film at Cal Poly Humboldt. Her current film “Welcome to the Enclave” premiered at Nitehawk Cinemas in Brooklyn this spring and recently screened at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, where it won an Honorable Mention prize, Cucalorus Film Festival, and in two pavilions at The Wrong Biennale. She was awarded the grand prize for Blue Star Contemporary’s Projection/Projektion video program in collaboration with Darmstädter Sezession in Germany, where she was an artist in residence in summer 2023. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from University of Louisville and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004.
IG: @sarah_lasley
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