Shannon Stovall

Like most familial relationships, the relationship I have with my mother and my stepfather is most simply described as complicated. During a trip to Wisconsin to visit them, I realized that the theatrical and absurd domestic spaces I have created would be a fertile playground to finally explore these vulnerable relationships. My mother was never a traditional American mother, and in all the nearly fifteen apartments we shared we hardly ever ate dinner at the table. For this reason, it was important to me that the environment of my video, What I don’t have is a sediment filter (2018) remains fixed in the space that always felt distant and vulnerable. In this video, my mother and I attempt to share a meal, only to find that the fork-like apparatus we are using to consume our spaghetti and tomato sauce is faulty. I constructed the forks out of dried spaghetti, the same material we are trying to consume but in an altered state— a mirage of the real thing. Its construction is shoddy and falls apart as we attempt to eat our dinner. Regardless of the futile labor that is necessary for this activity, we persist, all while exchanging glances and listening to a recording of my stepfather explaining how sediment filters and reverse osmosis work. The video is subtitled, reminiscent of a foreign film.