[A dispassionate youth lays bare what's on his mind. Diaristic notes appear on the screen and then melt away, supported by a nauseating medley of pop songs. A meditation on yearning and the gnawing doubts of the terminally insecure.]

 

“An echo is the return of an originating voice in a distorted and diminished way. In Echo Valley, there are no originating voices, but only endless, undiminished echoes. This slight, frothy videotape manages to juxtapose high and low culture idioms in a way that undermines their respective implications and creates new hybrids.” (Argos Distributor Catalogue)

[An episodic meta-portrait project in which Reinke lenses a half dozen familiars in domestic settings. Over each he has laid characteristically witty, sometimes subversive epithets, many of which seem confessional, intimate, even deeply personal. None relate particularly to the small gestures depicted in the tape, though viewer’s habits may be relied upon to perform the marriage of picture and sound in order to create a temporary coherence. As if to underline the instability of the subject position, each of the voice-overs is delivered by the artist in the first person, Reinke always say, “I.” But the pictures keep changing, the age of the “actors”, even their genders shift, while the “I” remains consistent throughout.]

 

“What I added to the images of Echo Valley are little written monologues, a parallel stream of information that can be attributed to the person pictured or to the artist as implied narrator. I hope it’s also unclear which texts belong to which character.” (Steve Reinke)