Pope.L: Snow Crawl, the footage was captured in Maine because I was teaching there for about 20 years. It took me a while to appreciate the winters and the fact that temperatures of that quality and that depth have a certain kind of materiality to it. Making art in that temperature does something to the way you make it. Very different than working in an urban setting, but the threat of harm is still there.
So there’s this character who used to do these activities in the streets. He used to crawl on the street in New York, and now suddenly he's in this other environment. Maybe he's moved there. Maybe he's on vacation and now he's doing it in the cold or in the snow.
I captured footage over maybe four or five years. I'm wearing this super suit, Superman suit. I'm doing my supercrawl thing. But I'm holding my white cat in this white world. And it looks like a home movie. And so in certain ways there's a sense of being at home, but because it's viewed through this great distance it has this sort of homelessness about it at the same time.
One of the things you'll notice about it is the birds. Birds in winter are different than birds in summer. And the way they sound when the sound is ricocheting off of snow from weather and absorbed by trees. It's a different kind of sound. And for an urban kid to be thinking this way, was a revelation to me. I always thought of sound occurring among buildings. That you have to have, you know, a built environment to have sound, but you don't really.