Parker Donaldson

Virtual Exhibition

Group Catalogue Site

A Gross Fugue with Rose Colored Glasses

Stylized as a faux-children's program, "A Gross Fugue with Rose-Colored Glasses" details the conversations and relationship between my own character that of Felix the puppet. The video unpacks existential themes as performed through songs and dialogue, emulating my own childhood series such as Mister Roger's Neighborhood, Sesame Street and Blues Clues.

One of my initial goals in creating a visual language for this short film and accompanying exhibition (both titled 'A Gross Fugue With Rose-Colored Glasses) was to establish an environment where ego, can be given spatiality. Working with puppetry and emulating the look, feel and sounds of my childhood programs is a personal confrontation—the memories of joy and play from that time in my life have before appeared to me as hallowed and incorruptible. I feel that engaging within this ‘incorruptible’ space serves to question and flatten the hierarchy of these memories of the past.

In my video, I try to underscore this idea of agency and temporality within the dynamic of the puppeteer and puppet.

The theoretical framework of the video is influenced by ideas of the hauntological and temporal disjuncture within our present moment.  These ideas question our relationship between the virtual and the actual.

Our access and our ability to re-watch and re-experience old shows, games, movies, music, fashion etc. in abundance, is an unprecedented conversation that we now have with our past. A major question throughout my research and development of this body of work explores the consequences of this situation. How does this access, or possible inundation, with the past effect our current sense of temporality? Is hidden within the pain of our nostalgic practices today a feeling of dislocation within time? A word used to describe this phenomenon is ‘hauntology’ or as described by theorist, Mark Fisher, as “the agency of the virtual…that which acts without (physically) existing.” (Fisher, 2014:8-9)