Yogini Ouroboros:
An Alchemical Quest for a Deeper Backbend
Yogini Ouroboros: An Alchemical Quest for a Deeper Backbend, 2023, stop motion video, 52 seconds
Sources images are from my original screen prints or public domain alchemical texts and illuminated manuscripts. Music is public domain and by Chanticleer, Sanctus Polyphony
made during the Kolaj on Film residency, August 2023
Yogini Ouroboros: The Quest for a Deeper Backbend
installation view from Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach, Florida, 2024
I am routinely pushed Instagram ads for training programs to ‘deepen backbends,’ featuring limber women in unattainable yoga poses. This urgency for seemingly supernatural flexibility appears to come from a more desperate desire to feel whole, or a oneness with mother nature. The green snake eating its own tail is a symbol of circularity and an infinite cycle of destruction and rebirth. Thus, Yogini Ouroboros: The Quest for a Deeper Backbend offers a ten-pose yoga sequence aimed at transforming the practitioner by bringing her to a state of ecstatic eternal return.
silkscreen print with hand embellishment
This is a series of screen prints with metallic paint and foiling details, depicting a cycle of transformation in the style of an illuminated manuscript. It became the base of the stop motion video above.
Shorter sequence, ceramic with gold luster. Photograph from December 2023 in Macy Gallery, NYC.