Steffani Jemison

Maniac Chase
2008
Single-channel video

Part of a series of looping video installations that evoke the tension between progress and escape.

Inspired by a 1904 film of the same name, “Maniac Chase” is influenced by early cinema's narrative strategies that emphasized repetition and accumulation rather than progress and change. In my piece, four African-American figures run through a series of urban landscape scenes in a continuous loop, an ambivalent gesture that evokes persistence and futility.