A.3 | EP.9 | Set without Subject

(Language as Matter)

Painting, fashion, and the construction of nostalgia through repetition and recombination. Dreams, cultural memory, and circulating images assembled into compositions whose histories may be real, imagined, or borrowed.

(participant)

Elodie Goldberg Jacquemain, Christina Frank, Danita Nuchsawat Appelbaum, Adam Katz, Clinton Hughes, Dennita Sewell, & Kim Askew Kramer

(Organization)

ASU FIDM MUSEUM

(Master Shot)

AROUND DOWNTOWN LA - MONTAGE

(A)

INT - ASU FIDM MUSEUM - VINYL WALL SIGNAGE

ELODIE GOLDBERG JACQUEMAIN stands before a wall bearing a quotation from Kurt Andersen about technological progress and cultural nostalgia. The text describes a future increasingly occupied by images and sounds from the past. ELODIE moves through the frame while the words remain fixed. The camera follows at another pace. A contemporary body passes before a proposition about the impossibility of escaping history.

(B)

INT - MUSIC VIDEO DISPLAY

A rapid succession of images flickers across a monitor. Grunge, rap, Madonna. Music videos, fashion, and popular culture absorb visual languages once associated with the avant-garde. Styles recur across decades, detached from their original circumstances and made available for new uses. The monitor presents history as an accumulation of images without a stable chronology.

(c)

INT - GARMENT DISPLAYS

ELODIE moves between three display frames. Vertical divisions interrupt the continuity of her figure. The body appears whole, fragmented, and whole again. The composition holds briefly before its separate panels detach and fall away through stop-motion animation. Garments, bodies, and architectural divisions lose their original relationships. The final fragments disappear into darkness.

(Film Abstract)

Nostalgia is often understood as a longing for something personally remembered. Yet much of what we recognize as the past reaches us through images, recordings, clothing, and stories that precede our own experience. The internet intensifies this condition, making different historical moments simultaneously available while obscuring the circumstances of their production. Obsessed: Fashion and Nostalgia in the '90s at the ASU FIDM Museum provided an occasion to consider how cultural memory is constructed through repetition, appropriation, and the circulation of images. A decade becomes recognizable through a limited repertoire of signs, even to those who never experienced it.

The film emerged through The Pioneers Co-Op and an exchange of material between artists, designers, and writers. Adam Katz's dream poetry, developed through Vera Maurina Press, introduced memories and imagined situations that could not be assigned a stable origin. Danita Nuchsawat Appelbaum contributed croquis and fashion illustrations, Clinton Hughes of The Oddinary Studios styled the micro-film, and Elodie Goldberg Jacquemain developed its visual structure and appears onscreen. Christina Frank also participated in the project, with support from Dennita Sewell and Kim Askew Kramer. The resulting composition draws from the exhibition, the Vera Maurina Press archive, and newly produced images, allowing distinct authorships and historical references to coexist without resolving into a single narrative.

Painting provides a material precedent for this process. Its surface permits images, gestures, and references from different moments to occupy the same space without preserving their original chronology. A borrowed image need not retain its previous meaning, while a newly invented form may appear strangely familiar. Through split screens, digital layering, and stop-motion fragmentation, Obsessed extends these conditions into film. The composition does not reconstruct the 1990s or attempt to recover an authentic past. It investigates how arrangements of existing material can produce the sensation of memory, including memories of things that never happened.