In “long departed,” nostalgic cameos of dead relatives are resuscitated. The desire to breathe life into the still image of the long departed is echoed in the movements of the central cameo, where I climb around a dead tree. Deeds inspired by the video projection are enacted in the performance space. These activities recall the imagined histories of the departed, embodied by actions such as knitting together gothic vines, expanding, deflating and excavating the intestines of bagpipes and healing damaged limbs with small plants. The anuses of plastic cats are covered with band-aids by a few viewers. The identical, triplet cats are taped to and spun from a broom; the kitty litter, mixed with sparkles, breaks through the bandaging and pours into the space. A pathetic white flag attempts to be raised in the inadequate wind of a standing fan. The objects are attempted to be gathered up, but end in a sculptural pile of performance refuse on the gallery floor.

The performance is a meditation on the conflation of time and integrates several generations of persons and symbolic objects. Immigration, war and colonial/settler crimes, poverty/Catholicism and personal illness and disability are some of the conditions that figure prominently in this work.