Pure sensual experience can only occur in the present. Subsequent interpretations of these fleeting experiences are bound by our personal, symbolic and narrative lexicons. While the mind creates a facade of rhetoric to understand the hows and whys of sensual experience, further alienating us from the original moment, documentary has the potential to demystify these facades. To peel them back and reveal the authentic experiences that make up the structure of character and circumstance.
While documentary has license and ability to reveal these experiences within its characters, it is video art that is best suited to reveal the anatomy of experience itself.
By use of ambiguous and abstract forms, overly familiar associations are challenged. Time is suspended or compressed to hold open dimensional doors for the transcendence of signifier-based life. Ecstatic moments are prolonged, allowing for the purge of interpretations until one is an empty receptacle, left only with movement, color, and form. Free from the world of language and familiar schemas, the viewer is in a place for creative self-destruction, a healing place. With each purge comes an empty space and an opportunity for reinvention. In this way, video art can be a tool for purification.
Ryan Wylie, co-founded Inner Mission Productions, where he has shot, edited, and produced documentaries about reproductive healthcare in the Peruvian Andes, the death penalty, the Sanctuary movement, indigenous land entitlement in Mexico and Peru, and many other topics of social importance.
His efforts as a filmmaker/activist have led to reversals of Supreme Court precedent and the release of Joe Amrine, an innocent man that had been on death row for seventeen years. His work has been screened for diverse audiences, from the UN Human Rights Council to the Montreal Ethnographic Film Festival. In addition to making videos, Wylie has taught at the Maine Media Workshops, Missouri Scholars Academy and guest lectured at over a dozen universities.
Wylie is also co-founder/curator of the Free Form Film Festival, where he has traveled as a curator and video performer, organizing over 100 public art events since 2003. Some performance venues include: Lollapalooza (2006), True False Film Festival (2005, 2007, 20010), many nights at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, and more...