IMAGES
Top to bottom: ‘Haunted States’ (2006) group exhibition at GrandArts, Kansas City, MO, ‘Last Will and Testament’ (2004), ‘Oaths of Signature’ (2005), ‘Liable Precipitants of Miraculous Gifts’ (2006), ‘Double REM Sleep’ (2008), ‘On the Lawn of the White House’ (2005).

Video has played a prominent role in CarianaCarianne’s work, providing a means for them to visually articulate the body as a politically shared space and extending their investigations of how cultural systems organize conceptions of the self. In a number of projects they use video to record live performances, which they edit using split-screen techniques and later re-present. For many of these works, the original performance consisted of the two selves taking turns performing certain actions, such as falling from a standing position or reading from their separate last wishes in a shared legal will. The videos of the proceedings use a visual doubling effect to compress the two distinct sets of actions so that they occur side by side and unfold simultaneously, giving equal ground to both selves and creating an experience of synchrony.
~ excerpt from The Museum of Contemporary Photography, MidWest Photographers Project, Chicago

FROM THE ARTIST:
We often search the media for doubled images. We look for images that ultimately readdress and question collaboration. On the Lawn of the White House (2005) is a perfect example of a preexisting double document that interests us. We are particularly interested in the political framework that the doubled and antithetical identity creates. Not only is dichotomous consensus in question, but the

image also spurs questions regarding the potency of contracts. This image, of Arafat and Rabin signing the Oslo Peace Accord, captures the peace accord as possibly the most favored and the most failed doctrine of the 21st century.

Creating, signing and enacting our own peace accord actually prompted me to question the effectiveness of legal contracts. We began to wonder if legal contracts actually

embraced part of the unknown. Liable Precipitants of Miraculous Gifts (2006) is a video recording of a true and personal story reconfigured as a sacred contract. The recording shows a doubled reclining torso on a bed with the necks decapitated as the heads naturally hung off of the beds edge. Speaking out of each mouth was a mythology of a double being that acknowledged the unknown, the intangible and the ever-present miracle of uncertainty.