Rituals for a Still Life

1974-75, 24:54 min, b&w, sound

A stunning graphic composition of form and surface, Rituals for a Still Life links Gillette's video and collage work. Here he constructs a series of enigmatic collages that have as their background a television monitor showing his videotapes. Gillette builds a tension between static objects and the moving video images, both in the deliberate ambiguity of scale, and in the way these images flatten the video image. Meditative yet charged, these collages reveal surface abstraction rarely achieved in video.