Emerson Voss - "WINDOWS"
Emerson Voss - WINDOWS Film Installation
Voss achieves the goal of his art, and is able to precisely constrain the observer in a world of wonderous stupor.
Emerson Voss is a young composer and video artist based out of Pittsburgh. His recent film installation, WINDOWS, premiered in mid-October at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination. WINDOWS consisted of a room containing three large, synchronized video projections of Voss' own windows in his living room overlooking Squirrel Hill. Stephen Wuchina, the actor present in the film, also performed live in the room during the original presentation. The projections, along with Voss' audio accompaniment, left the audience and spectators in a hypnotic trance, stuck between reality and delusion. Voss, as many artists the past year, was clearly inspired by the pandemic, saying that WINDOWS is a "meditation on isolation and our desire for connection" (watch the trailer and full-length film here).
Voss achieves the goal of his art, and is able to precisely constrain the observer in a world of wonderous stupor. WINDOWS runs a wide gamut of emotions, encompassing loneliness, wonder, sentimentality, fear, serenity, basically anything and everything various peoples have experienced due to the pandemic. Voss' use of simultaneous contrasting lighting and color in the three panels convey the sense of an awkward, unexperienced filmmaker, but it in fact works to his advantage. The overall aesthetic creates an intimate experience, allowing each person to feel as though they are all unseen witnesses to life as time moves back and forth at varied speeds.
Surprisingly from a composer, but not unheard of from Voss' past works, the music actually functions as background material, simply being sounds to fill out the full experience of the installation. Voss expertly blends amateurly recorded ambient noise and clipped sounds from a phone conversation with his own scoring of instruments and electronics to create the full soundtrack. The final result of the immersive installation is an opening into a new metaphysical world, both visually and aurally.
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