“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art, but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.” — Maya Deren
An adolescent boy encounters the white and chrome rooms of an ultra-modernist interior, in a meditatively paced series of vignettes in which his crisp yet languid movements and passages of stillness create an emotional match between his demeanor and his surroundings. We see the boy again occupying a more lived-in, colorful, warmer home which he seems to share with a young girl. Though in that space they enact the rituals of domestic existence, they are frequently seen as “alone together” and their direct interactions are awkwardly minimal. Though far from silent, there is very little dialogue in these mesmerizing, mysterious, disarming, and ambiguous architectural and psychological configurations. The boy further appears in and alongside stormy mountaintops, verdant creekside valleys, spiky topographical expanses, homespun architectural ruins, icons of Land Art, and rainy city vistas. Large-scale, more narratively linear projections are presented in a familiar movie-screen format; while smaller video-collage animation loops unfold like endless origami horizons across digital screens embedded into geometrical sculptures occupying the walls, floors, and corners of the space — behaving more like sculptures and paintings than like conventional videos.
While the dimensional objects do reference sculpture and certain shaped-canvas tropes of post-minimalism, in some ways with The Janus Restraint, Anderson is also going to back to his roots in photography and experimental cinema, deploying witty jump cuts, lyrical loops, pure optical juxtapositions, and other trappings of a collage-based aesthetic belonging to a time as enamored of what cinema could do as a formal matter as by the stories it could contain. Anderson is continuing to create the photographs, video-based sculptural objects, and animations that also define the project, which he has always intended as a multifaceted narrative that incorporates not only disparate types of pieces but also disparate avenues of dissemination — gallery shows, social media, performances, public interventions, and most recently, a/v musical collaborations in both video and live-performance formats.
Anderson’s hybridized formal structures support the work’s conceptual blending of the personal and art historical. And his penchant for experiential materials-gathering necessitates extensive travel that is also a consequence of his personal wanderlust — regularly leaving not only the hermetic studio, but the state, the country, and the continent for locations that have meanings to offer — Iceland, the glaciers in Banff and Jasper; the deserts of the American West. He now finds himself skewing some solo and family trips to incorporate salient locations. This meta-fusion of intentions and actions represents an aspect and an expression of the overall project’s hybrid character in which memories are sincere and constructed, spontaneous and choreographed, natural and deliberate. It is worth noting that Anderson has been using his son Finn and Finn’s friends as actors rather than casting strangers — both as a matter of convenience and as a matter of inspiration linked to observations on human nature made in the context of parenthood. Yet for all that, the project stands as more of an allegory for adulthood than as a portrait of childhood — one that both deracinates and delineates the context of its own paradoxical existence.