ASSIGNMENT #1, Task #3 by Caitlin Baker

This room is called the 'blue room'.

It is the former bedroom of my boyfriend, Dante's, late father. It was the room I stayed in during reading week, in Thunder Bay, Ontario. As appropriate for an unmarried couple, my boyfriend stayed in another room despite the fact that we have been living with each other for over three years.
The moment I walked into the room and sat on the bed, I looked up to this scene. Left alone with dust motes floating through beams of light, no noise except the distant rumblings of domesticity, I had a moment  that is as close as I can relate to an affective experience. For me, the punctum in this room is the heatbreaking absurdity of the details: this vaccuum of time.
The 70's beach mural paired with the 90's portrait, the 25 year anniversary plaque and medieval catholic imagery, everything is just slightly off kilter. What I love most is how mundane the intent behind the design of the room is. As a guest room, things have been added to the walls quietly over the years, lined up with care then left unvisited until someone like me comes through.
I watched Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void several weeks ago. What resonated with me visually was the intense feeling of what felt like flying through and over the walls like a spirit. I remember a blur of pinky red and a dark humming noise, as though I was experiencing each moment from inside one of the main character's bodies. What I pulled from the movie to relate to this image is the sense of the past, taking a little piece of a room and pausing it to focus on the implications of the scene. While the film was expressive in its ephemeral exploration of memory, this image is stark and banal. For me, there is a equal strangeness to the experience of thinking about the past.

This is the original image I was going to submit to this assignment. I watched Enter the Void a few weeks ago, so the images I can recall feature blurred, sensual colors the seem to melt into each other. This image is inspired by the ending sequence when all the men are having sex at the same time (I don't remember the main character saying this would happen, but apparently it was predicted.) I just remember all the women being on their backs, looking drugged and out of it. While it references the visual and the feeling I get from the film, I still like the first image I submitted for it's strangeness.