Sobriety
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Sobriety

Ulysses Jenkins 
2022, 5:41 min, color, sound, HD video

Description

Jenkins’ music video for his conceptual art band Othervisions offers strategies for keeping one’s head above water amid tumult. Glowing natural scenes—a bubbling stream, spring florals—juxtapose with media clips testifying to widespread global violence and the rise of American neoconservatism. Jenkins’ superimposed image dances across the screen as found footage skews towards cultural turmoil: massively attended Trump/Pence rallies, videos of police brutality, and images from the January 6th radical conservative insurrection in the U.S. Capital. The artist also appears alongside these scenes, now embodying the withering subject of political demise. Jenkins, as the artist, offers lyrical insight: “Sobriety has come to me so much more // when it’s life you be high about.”