Title: “Hi there, my name is Pancho?”
Medium: video
additional information about the artist: panchopanoptes.weebly.com
One always–always–sits with yesterday in mind. If by mind we are implying memory, and memory implying thought, and thought implying knowledge: it all condenses into the known, which is always in the past; always the yesterday. Knowledge is the past: So how could one attempt to face the now–the ever changing truth–through knowledge? How does one attempt to understand the unknown with the tools of the known? The end of knowledge is the awakening of intelligence; the awakening of creativity: Of being able to experience the here and now—the present– from moment to moment without betraying it with the known–the past.
“Hi there, my name is Pancho?” seeks to explore the parameters of being. The implications behind an individual wearing a mask and calling himself Pancho vs. a number of others wearing the same mask and calling themselves Pancho. At what point does Pancho cease to be something tangible? At what point does it become an idea? Was it always an idea, one that is acted out?—How much of ourselves are ideas? Are we ideas of ourselves acted out? Is this idea of ourselves our very own? Or is someone else enforcing us to anthropomorphize their idea?
Peer Reviews
1
The premise for Pancho Panoptes’ video “Hi there, my name is Pancho?” is simple–a masked man speaks to the camera, and can’t be heard–yet asks complex questions. A question mark in the title is perhaps the first indication that this is a piece about uncertainty. We meet our protagonist without any sort of setup or context, and by the end of the video remain uncertain not only of his identity but of his origins, his relationship to us, and his agenda. I find Panoptes’ use of constructed “barriers” (masks, costumes, music, doorways) especially interesting. Although the man becomes increasingly urgent and animated in his address, access to any real knowledge of him is frustrated by these many walls. Somehow in this all the impossibility of language and human exchange is successfully communicated. A piece that leaves us guessing, and does so with humor and tenderness, is a welcome addition to the show.
2
By examining the idea of preconceptions through appearances, and perceptions through body-language, Panoptes questions not only what we see, but what we believe we are seeing and of course what we believe because of what we perceive. Through the act of removing sound, the viewer is forced to make “blind” assumptions through the known information that is given by Panoptes clothing and body-language. This leaves one to ask, is this how we are forced to judge people on a regular basis, going off of what we see therefore equaling what we “know” about a person?
