TRISHES has a few thoughts about your selfies.
Actually, she’s mulled over the nature of human self-reflection enough to organize an entire artistic presentation on mirrors, cameras, and film (all without adopting some kind of downward-punching satire like The Chainsmokers’ eyeroll anthem “#Selfie,” we might add).
Titled “Saraswati,” the newest song and video from the Berklee grad take a magnifying glass to how humans examine themselves — and how we can never actually get an accurate look from the mirror, despite our best efforts.
“We use our environment to reflect ourselves; we learn who we are through the context of other,” TRISHES says. “A lot of what reflects us may not reflect us accurately — like a funhouse mirror or a ripple in a pond reflection. For now I’ve come to the conclusion that true self awareness comes from our relationship to love and death.”
Collaborating directly with choreographer Kalbe Isaacson and director/videographer Tamara Arroba, TRISHES fashioned an observational, almost mythic representation of humanity’s evolving relationship with the forces of love and mortality.
“We went into choreographing this piece knowing that I represented death and love, and the interaction between Kalbe and I would be a deeply emotional push and pull,” she tells Vanyaland. “We also knew that we needed to get to a few key story points as well as props: The iPhones, the mask unveiling, the wig and makeup, the circular mirror. I came to Kalbe with the ideas I had and she choreographed from there. After a few weeks of working together on the choreo, Tam came in and then we revised it to include her and the camera.”
As TRISHES re-dons her plague doctor mask at the end of the vid, the project brims with the exact “existential absurdity” that she wanted to capture from the get-go. Clean-cut, imaginative, and highly theoretical, “Saraswati” presents the core nature of TRISHES as an artist – and there’s no distortion in that truth.
“We also knew we wanted some of the movement to be a bit silly and fun, because even though humans are constantly surrounded by death, and our deaths are imminently growing closer, we still have fun, we go to the post office, we fall in love, we watch basketball games. There’s an existential absurdity to it and in this metaphorical dance with death – I felt it was important to represent that, too.”