Artist Statement – “Untitled”

Brooke Bolding and Jackie Rosen

Our video explores societal attitudes towards mental health, and how those attitudes inform our relationships to people with radically different ideologies.  Othering and mental health were our collaborative focus, both of which pertain to themes of justice.  We collaborated through all aspects of our process, thinking to with a way to represent our topics.  We decided to integrate a newsreel style into our video in order to historicize the treatment and misrepresentation of people with mental disorders.  By then shifting to a more experimental approach, we hope to call attention to the way attitudes about mental health, while seemingly evolved, are still out of date.  The attitudes about mental health inform the language people use all the time when describing people who think very differently from them.  Our video is a radical adaptation of our combined essay.  The modes of representation we employed are primarily performative and reflexive.  We call upon the cultural icon of Nurse Ratched to establish a frame of reference for our audience, which we later challenge.  The most challenging aspect of this project was representing our message visually.