Janus
2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
3:30 min.
Miljohn Ruperto
Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways. He is usually depicted with two faces as he looks both forward and backward, to the future and the past. The video, which is deftly animated in collaboration with Aimée de Jongh, presents a close-up of a dying “duck-rabbit,” a vivified version of an ambiguous illustration made popular by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations . One’s attention shifts between seeing a duck and a rabbit, prompted by the animal’s movements and sounds. Its red eyes, wounded body, and belabored breathing suggest the end of life. Just as it appears to take its last breath, however, it inhales again, teetering on the precipice. As the video continues its unceasing loop, a resolution is withheld. In this way, Ruperto makes a connection between the ambiguity of visual perception and the paradox of life and death as embodied by this fragile animal in its final moments.
Miljohn Ruperto is a cross-disciplinary artist working across photography, cinema, performance, and digital animation. His work refers to historical and anecdotal occurrences, and speculates on the nature of assumed facts and the construction of truth. Often involving replicas, modified versions, and enactments—including Chinese-made reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea ; modified images based on the 15th century Voynich Manuscript; or reworked footage of Filipino actress Isabel Rosario Cooper—Ruperto takes cultural and historical references and untethers them from their original context to challenge our perception and generate something altogether new. Ruperto’s work is often informed by his collaborations with experts from other disciplines including Dutch animator Aimée de Jongh, neuroscientist and engineer Rajan Bhattacharyya, photographer Ulrik Heltoft among others. Through a richness and diversity of lenses, and preferencing the obscure, mysterious and the magical, his work challenges fixed conceptions of truth and history, and instead speaks of an indeterminacy and subjectivity of experience that renders truth and fiction near indistinguishable.
Colors:
Related works featuring themes of: » Black-and-White Photography, » Contemporary Fact Versus Fiction, » Dark, » Flora, » Filipino and Danish
» see more
© » KADIST
Natasha Wheat
2011Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
© » KADIST
Zanele Muholi
2014As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
© » KADIST
Minouk Lim
2012The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Miljohn Ruperto
2009Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts...
© » KADIST
Natasha Wheat
2011Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
© » KADIST
Zanele Muholi
2014As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Toyin Ojih Odutola
2015As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous...
Related works from the » 2010's created around » Los Angeles, California
» see more
© » KADIST
Will Rogan
2010MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
© » KADIST
Phillip Maisel
2015While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
© » KADIST
Will Rogan
2014Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
© » KADIST
Matt Lipps
2011In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Other works by: » Miljohn Ruperto
» see more
© » KADIST
Miljohn Ruperto
2009Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts...
© » KADIST
Miljohn Ruperto
2009Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth...
© » KADIST
Miljohn Ruperto
2017Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Michael Armitage
2015In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message...
© » KADIST
Thea Djordjadze
2010The sculpture And Shadows Will Follow is an angle piece that articulates a space since its appearance highly changes depending on the point of view...
© » KADIST
Julien Crépieux
2012Julien Crépieux is interested in the medium of video and its confrontation with cinema...
© » KADIST
Geof Oppenheimer
2011Designed as an installation timed spent is determined by the viewer, as with classical sculpture, Anthems is a piece that is in place, and in time, and an important genre of video within the collection...