Darren Banks

Untitled 2010 Darren banks The film footage used in Untitled 2010 is taken from a film called Season of the Witch, also known as Hungry Wives, and Jack's Wife; George A Romero's third horror film. Filmed in 1971 and released in 1973, the film is about a lonely housewife who becomes involved in witchcraft. The protagonist, Joan Mitchell (Jan White) is the 39-year-old wife of a businessman. Joan has been seeing a psychotherapist because of her recurring dreams about her husband. I decided to loop together all of Joan’s dream sequences; I wanted to show Joan locked in a constant loop, trapped in limbo between a nightmarish dream and the stark reality of waking. More Importantly Within these dream sequences the reason for her increasingly terrifying nightmares seem to bare some relation to a small sculpture that sits on the dresser in her bedroom (1970’s kitsch statue of a bull “Picasso like figurine”). There seems to be a mystical/ supernatural relationship or connection between Joan and the figurine, which is never explained. The statue acts as a symbol or signifier of some other looming presence. The static object in turn becomes otherworldly and animated through its relationship to Joan in her subconscious state. I wanted this uneasy and looming feeling to follow through into the sculpture itself. This was achieved through the creation of a problematic relationship which exists between the materials and objects which seem to balance in a unrealistic configuration, an unsafe construction which towers over the viewer and seems, if only for a second, to defy logic and reason.