|
|
A journey into a terrain where pathology meets boredom, where horror meets melancholic loss,
and where the will to live meets a grossly heavy impulse to self-erasure.
Narcolepsy is a disturbingly ambiguous novella in pictures and words by Max Pam
(photographer) and Robert Cook (writer). A collision between image and text, it is a journey into a
terrain where pathology meets boredom, where horror meets melancholic loss, and where the will to
live meets a grossly heavy impulse to self-erasure.
The core of Cook’s fictional text uses several interlocking motifs to examine aspects of the
compulsion to self-harm (in the form of self-burial), its effects on the harmer and its effects on
others, and other more oblique issues to do with progress, ambition, contemporary nationalism and
personal (and interpersonal) ethics.
Max Pam’s photographs frame and extend the texts, pushing the project into a realm of
resonantly hallucinatory intensity and imbuing it with a deliberately cinematic quality. These
works are taken from various periods of his practice (including images of his immediate family –
wife, son and daughter), and are all from the occidental world. In fresh pictorial combinations and
pitched against the text, they speak in radically new ways, revealing a barely suppressed
human fever to connect.
MAX PAM
|
