The Fall of Icarus, 2013
Video projection, 3:37min looped
Dimensions variable
Music credit: Marcel Pequel - Nine
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Marcel_Pequel/
The myth of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, is about the desire to reach beyond one’s limitations, but also the hubris of not heeding the advice of others.
My own myth centers around an accident in 2009, the story goes I was lost in the middle of the night, to find my way home I scaled the exterior of a 3 story building, I slipped, feel to earth, landed head first, and was found lying in the grass and snow, paralysed from the chest down. Exactly what happened isn’t known; instead it is pieced together from different sources and recited as fact. In the days, months and years following, the story change and evolved, like all myths do, with each retelling shaping the events to suit whoever was passing it on.
This work is an attempt to question where my story fits into this Icarian allegory: am I an example of strident ambition stretching beyond defined limits? Or a beautiful tragedy, a somber warning to those who would dare follow where I once tried to tread?
Or in the end whether our myths are, as W.H. Auden so poignantly put it, in reference to Pieter Brueghel’s ‘The Fall of Icarus’: “Not an important failure…” but, simply, “…something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky”.