Epiphany  (2006)

The medium is the message.

--- Marshall McLuhan

Single channel video
Stereo audio
5:16 exhibition loop    1:00 sample


     In Epiphany, I take medium to be the entire text of American advertising and entertainment in the 1950's and early 60's, expressed most profoundly in the content of television commercials. Two prom night sweethearts are at play in a mass media pinball game, their identities, assumptions, and aspirations all the product of American TV culture.

     In the summer of 2005, after an absence of some forty years, I attended a reunion of my high school class in central Kansas.  At our first evening meeting, behind all the cocktail chatter of success, near success, failure, near failure, love, almost love, divorce, second husbands, second wives, second homes, second mortgages, children, grandchildren, stepchildren, life, and death, was the sound of a pinball machine.