Alaya

For Nathaniel Dorsky, “the cinema screen is a ‘speaking character,’ and the images function as pure energy rather than acting as secondary symbol or as a source for information or storytelling.” With Alaya, he invites us, by creating an affinity of scale, to an encounter between sand, silica and silver halide, one of the constituent elements of emulsion; silver film. Blurring our reference points between what is represented and what is the medium of this representation, he creates a reflexive visual poem around the Buddhist notion of Alaya (“consciousness as receptacle”), here referring as much to a part of the human psyche as to the filmic medium.