Yes, Yes It Is Burning Me, 2019 Two-channel video installation
Filmed in a variety of locations on Hydra Island, Greece, Yes, Yes It Is Burning Me is a dual-channel video installation exploring humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. The title of the installation is a response to the questions posed by a monk at a local monastery: “Is the stone warm from the sun? Can you feel it? Do you like it? Does it go all the way down your body as you hold it?” Combining rich visual elements and natural sounds recorded on the island, Yes, Yes It Is Burning me centers on the conveyance of rocks, a representation of all matter, as a symbolic focal point.
Through a series of symbolically lush vignettes, the viewer observes the repetitive movement of stones. These objects take on a variety of interpretations, spanning a diverse spectrum of contexts and human interactions. The visceral narrative journeys through towns, farms, beaches, a boat graveyard, a monastery, a casino, and the Deste Foundation’s Slaughterhouse project space. From strangers and local villagers to the artist herself, the video’s human participants exist within an unidentifiable moment in time, illustrating a universal preoccupation with purpose, meaning, and motion detached from progress.
The video begins with a naked woman, Rogers herself, walking with a horse and baby mule. Ostensibly indicative of freedom and innocence, the harmonious scene is disrupted by the harsh, gradually revealed reality of them walking on a bed of trash against a backdrop of abandoned boats. In a more contemporary setting, Rogers is observed sleeping, intercut with footage of an abused donkey eating thorns and stones as a man wearing a saddle walks behind. Linking these scenes, images of subjugation and entropy are juxtaposed with moments of the artist meditatively, repetitively stacking rocks.
In a later time-lapsed scene, spanning the day’s course from sunrise to sundown, a local monk appears holding a rock. In a disturbingly charged hybrid of indecency and intimacy, the monk slides the rock up and down over the body of the artist as she lies on the ground. During this discomfiting, spontaneous moment of candid molestation—endured but unprompted by the artist—the monk poses the series of questions presaging the work’s title. In a local casino, the same rock is held by a series of individuals, each with a distinct sensation of its heft and import.
Ultimately, the film concludes in a state of play. Clad in a youthful yet danger-redolent yellow, Rogers stacks, throws, and arranges rocks with numbness or bliss, a monotony that recalls Camus’s reinterpretation of the ancient Greek myth: an image of Sisyphus smiling. Nancy L. Meyer
