Nora Rosenthal Household Portrait

Initiated during a period of familial grief, Household Portrait is a multichannel video work that simultaneously displays between 8 and 59 surveillance-camera sequences filmed inside a house. The shifting grid of black-and-white images directly echoes the protagonist’s voice, whose stream of thoughts is reflected in subtitles across the multiple screens. The work thus redirects the growing ubiquity of home security toward a more sensitive, introspective register. Here, the cameras intended to protect no longer monitor external threats, but rather probe inner, existential ones.  

Household Portrait frequently shows too many images to look at once; the viewer’s eyes are compelled to move from one screen to another, from one cluster of sequences to the next, in a disjointed rhythm that mirrors the modulations of a non-linear narrative. This disjunction invites the viewer into the time-space collapse of sorrow – the shock, the inability to focus. The rare moments of image concurrence only serve to highlight the overall barrage of images, held together by a voice that is both distant and intimate, suggesting that each room is at once distinct and identical–an allusion to the ways in which different spaces and temporalities sometimes appear to exist paradoxically and simultaneously, as observed in certain quantum physics experiments or in Buddhist philosophies. 

This impossible-yet-possible simultaneity echoes the experience of grief that is at the heart of Household Portrait. As the artist notes: “It is absurd, unseemly, overwhelming – a dense panic attack of a poem and an expression of the lonely confusion and mania of deep sadness, loss, and the love left in that wake.”