Covert Action – Is This What You Were Born For? Part 4

Constructed from looped home movies edited to create complex rhythms, slipping in and out of linear progression. The work explores the contours of film/narrative structures and the contradictions of sexual existence: antagonism, happiness, instability, security.- A.C.
‘This is very illicit stuff, very sexy material on which to speculate. The first speculation is in film terms, re-reading history, how memories are remembered. There is also a fondness for the captured image, the artifact. She has a very special eye, sense of humour, and condition to critique.’ – Lora Hirshburg.
‘ABIGAIL CHILD’s conception of cinema is a radical reworking of Eisensteinian -Vertovian montage to serve a subversion of cinematic and sexual politics. Child’s films are kinetic dramas of extraordinary craftsmanship and sensitivity. If most of Child’s films are non-narrative, or at least in search of one. Her film, as dynamic as Peter Kubelka’s work, is fractured: aphorisms in a disjunct discourse. Here rupture and repetition comprise of structuring principle. The film explodes in your face, it drives on until its final image, a summation of its prehistory, history, and future- a tree being uprooted. What could be a more apt metaphor for the contemporary crisis in narrativity and sexuality?’ – Robert Hilferty, New York Native, 1986.