sound design by Alex Macia

filmed in NYC , November 2013.  Michael  is a compulsive masturbator and he uses sometimes his own reflection as a tool to get into a sexual head space.  I asked him if I could film him during one of those sessions.

Extract :  essay by Carrie Miller

-‘In a much more intimate encounter with the mirror, however, ‘Golden Years’ (2014) is a video which portrays a man in his 60’s holding a hand-held looking glass. It is a simple image of a man engaging with his own reflection, or so it seems. In keeping with the narcissistic theme of contemporary screen culture, he is engaging with his image as a tool for masturbation. But this is no emotionally benign moment. We see him cycle through a range of ambiguous feelings: from confrontation; to self-hatred; to a strangely maternal sense of comfort. In the end, his extreme act of narcissism dissolves the linguistic skin between his self and the world and he falls into the mirror, his reflection an empty surface.

Like Alice in her Wonderland, Michael, occupying a psycho-active headspace, appears to be on a deluded, impotent voyage of self-discovery, an internal trip beyond the figurative – a phenomenological experience that reflects the viewer’s experiences witnessing ‘Run, Run, Run’.

Alice’s own relationship to herself is unstable; she finds herself getting bigger, getting smaller. This slippage of her apparent reality creates the discomfort she feels – that we all feel in selfie culture – at having the tools at our disposal to be our ideal selves but at the same time never able to be ‘just right’ because the reality that the self is a fiction is always apparent.

All the while, Marti, through his remarkable and intensely intimate biographical works, returns the gaze of the viewer, and all its longing, with unblinking conviction.’-

Exhibited:

• Nervous Tension, curated by Annabelle Lacroix,  Careof , Milan,  Italy  2014
• RUN, RUN, RUN ,  Arc One Gallery, Melbourne 2014
• Art Stage– Singapore Art Fair, curated by Paul Greenaway,  2015
• Black Sun,  Perth  International – Fremantle arts Centre , solo exhibition  2016