Video Installations with Secret Friend's Elise Wunderlich
Videos by Elise Wunderlich
Multimedia artist Elise Wunderlich was born in the early 90’s in Portland, Oregon. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design’s Sculpture Program and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a ghost member at the Brooklyn Wayfarers Studio Program and is also the resident artist for our new series of immersive party installations, Secret Friend, that is in collaboration with Psymon Spine and Invertebrate Records. Focusing on how we process history and lived experience, Elise likes to think of the term “reenactments” as a way to describe her practice. She creates work that spans video, sculpture, and performance.
POND: What's the first thing you see when you wake up?
Elise: The white wall next to my bed, but in such utter half-consciousness.
POND: What does the corner of your street look like?
Elise: I live in Kensington, which is in South Brooklyn. It feels very much like I’m on the outskirts. On one corner of my street is a large concrete manufacturing plant and on the other is a liquor store.
POND: Re-enact your last interaction with a person.
Elise: Strictly platonic.
POND: Favorite VHS tape as a child.
Elise: I don't particularly remember specific ones. I do remember there was a large Blockbuster Video that was close to my house in Oregon where we would rent VHS tapes. One time, I remember my friends and I were having a sleepover and we walked to the store to rent a movie. We had brought my parent’s VHS camcorder with us and we had decided we would make a documentary titled “What Girls do at Sleepovers”. Obviously the store doesn't exist anymore, I think it’s now a veterinary clinic.
POND: How does the color yellow make you feel?
Elise: It makes me feel warm and nostalgic. It makes me think of sunburns, or 70’s glasses.
POND: Take us somewhere you've never been before.
Elise: I made a series of sculptures a couple years ago that referenced Kansas as a place, even though I’ve never been to Kansas. They were half based off a postcard my grandmother wrote, and half inspired by the dialogue from a home movie clip wherein I dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. I have an imagined picture of the sheer flatness and dryness of the landscape, like the surface of mars.
POND: Tell us a secret.
Elise: I’m not tellin’.
POND: Introduce us to a new friend.
Elise: This is my friend Charles graveyard-ing a Big Gulp at a 7/11 in South Orange New Jersey.