reviews > COVID-19

Kera MacKenzie
Kera MacKenzie

Oh, mementoes—even tidiness guru Marie Kondo makes special allowances for them. They are objects kept for reasons of oftentimes obscure personal value, and they can be anything from a cassette tape to a coffee mill, plastic toy car, pine cone, colorful Mardi Gras beads or wooden spoons. “boundarymind,” a short film directed by Kera MacKenzie with a soundtrack by Linda Jankowska and Katherine Young, features these and other items pulled from the composers’ childhoods. In the film their keepsakes dangle from the sky, are arranged and rearranged on a tabletop, beckon from around the corners of an old house, hang from the branches of a tree, and animate humorous little narratives. They can also apparently be used to make a lot of noise, despite not being anything close to proper musical instruments, a situation that allowed Jankowska and Young to create a composition ranging from clangy to eerie to plucky. Though many years in the making, “boundarymind” feels perfectly relevant now, when the pandemic has forced so many of us to stay home, surrounded by all our stuff. (A participatory performance/installation of the project scheduled to open at 6018North and Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago in June has been indefinitely postponed; a different iteration will happen in March at Roman Susan with the sculptor Molly Roth Scranton.)

—Lori Waxman 2020-10-30 2:47 PM