COMPOSITE
Video (color/sound), 23 min, 2017
COMPOSITE is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point the police composite sketch, playing with the sketching process in order to investigate the connections between language, visuality, and memory in our most intimate relationships.
While the standard composite sketch attempts to bring an unknown identity to light, COMPOSITE consists of a series of experiments in which interviewees work with a professional sketch artist in order to produce drawings not of strangers or suspects, but of the people closest to them. A man describes his wife of 50 years; identical twins, each other; a blind man, his own face.
Through this process, interviewees come to reconsider the people they take most for granted. As familiar faces emerge de-familiarized in the artist’s rendering, we are challenged to distinguish between the different registers of how we know our loved ones – physically, emotionally, rationally – and, in turn, how we know ourselves.