John Conomos

As an artist and writer of over 30 years, my work is principally ekphrastic in nature as I believe that art and writing is a dialogue with the past for the present and future. In the words of the poet Rilke, the artist is ‘a bearer of cultural memory.’ Consequently, art and writing that does not seek to account for the ideological power of one’s official culture is, for me, strictly decorative in essence. Whether it is video, new media, performance, directoral photography, installation, or radio art, much of it contains complex traces of the autobiographical anchored in one’s childhood and the biographical trajectory of one’s life.

Paging Mr Hitchcock is my video performance homage work dedicated to Hitchcock’s enduring cinema of suspense. I am seen addressing the filmmaker while holding a mask of his face. The first part is an assemblage of Hitchcock’s famous cameo appearances in his own films. The second part is my own performance in a long-take sequence. The video was shot in a studio with a red epic camera.