disembodied

“Disembodied” is a video installation that appeared in the group show “Smoke Season” at SOIL, August 2024, curated by Christian French. It is a smoke plume filmed with a Sony A7III at 120fps, spanning two 50″ 16×9 QLED monitors.

Disembodied (2024)
Video loop (7:12) on QLED monitors
88” x 26.5” x 6″
by janet galore

Wildfire smoke sometimes engulfs the neighborhood where I live in Seattle, during the hot summer months, making the sunlight a garish orange. Sometimes the particulate matter is so dense that ashes accumulate on cars and things outside. The ashes floating down from the sky are all that is left of the trees, and plants, and all the animals that were living in the forests that burned, like a distributed funeral of disembodied spirits. I was thinking a lot about ectoplasm, and the ghost photography of disembodied spirits that were ostensibly captured on film during séances in the late 1800s. The smoke in “Disembodied” can be interpreted as an incarnation of a spirit that is no longer on this plane.