The new multi-media installation by Catherine Forster titled They Call Me Theirs, addressed man’s desire to mediate the natural environment through technology. They Call Me Theirs reverses the experience of the outdoors by neatly packaging the four seasons in a “box set” that plays on a video monitor inside a rustic cabin, suggesting that our efforts to purify our experience with nature have actually taken us farther away from it.
In They Call Me Theirs, video, c-prints, sculpture and sound sync up to create an experience intended to question the distinctions we make between the natural and digital world. The title of the work is taken from a line in the poem “Hamatreya” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which questions man’s desire to claim ownership of the land that is inherently owned by nature. In the poem, the Earth responds, “How am I theirs, / If they cannot hold me, / But I hold them?” Similarly, the exhibition held a sound-insulated cabin or shrine for the viewer to enter. A hand-crafted hardwood box containing a small personal monitor with images of the four seasons sits inside. Two different cacophonous soundtracks play from both the interior and exterior, highlighting the tension between the realities of the two environments. In They Call Me Theirs, video, c-prints, sculpture and sound sync up to create an experience intended to question the distinctions we make between the natural and digital world.
