Everything Comes Full Circle. Lilan Yang
16mm film loop installation
Traveling from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I used a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. Everything Comes Full Circle is a personal attempt to remember things that will soon be forgotten.
The original footage was shot in Kodak 16mm film stocks during the summer of 2021. Later the digital moving images were inkjet printed on clear film spliced together with perforations cut out with a laser cutter. Each run of the projection makes the printer ink slowly melt, and the film will eventually fall into decay over the course of time.
Born and raised in Chongqing, China, Lilan Yang is an artist, cinéphile, and flâneuse whose practice involves both digital and analog media such as computing, data visualization, machine learning, photography, and filmmaking. Her artistic practice focuses on how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatus compared to digitally shared media, how memories can be multidimensional and fragile, and our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable and fictitious. She holds a BS in Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Digital + Media from Rhode Island School of Design.
