Description
Crawl is a short video done in a single-take. A woman in a red shirt and black capri jeans with bare feet inches her way through the dirt and gravel in a fissure or ditch below a broken cement surface. The tight shot makes it difficult to know if we are looking into a wall or down from a bird’s eye view, until the woman emerges at the other end. The sounds of construction equipment can be heard in the background.
Statement
Crawl was a spontaneous response to a real-life situation. Karen and her partner were renovating a new studio that was previously an industrial building. They were doing much of the demolition work themselves. The work was difficult and the project seemed to be endless. One day, in a gesture that recalls the tradition of endurance performance art, where artists put their bodies through some form of hardship, Karen asked her partner if he would film her crawling through a trench they were making in order to locate the plumbing. Not until the end of the video when she stands up and walks out the front door into the light of the day, does the viewer understand that the artist has been pulling herself through a trench.
Don Goodes & Karen Trask, 2024