Elegies (2019)
9 minutes 36 seconds
John is Eiko's long time friend. It was in July 2018 when both of them were attending the tree planting ceremony of their mutual friend Sam Miller at the Jacob's Pillow that Eiko invited John to join her Duet Project. John proposed to create a video work that they both speak to their dead mothers.
After exchanging their writings, the video was shot and edited by Brian Stevenson in the studios of Vermont PBS on November 22, 2019.
Special thanks to Larry Connolly.
On February 27, 2020, Elegies was screened at Vermont International Film Festival in Burlington as a double bill with Varda by Agnès, the final film directed and written by Agnès Varda.
Elegies was in an exhibition at Helen Day Art Center entitled “Love Letters” opening January 16, 2020 through April 18, 2020.
On August 12, Elegies was included in a showcase of five short films from New England, "Made Here: Women's Stories" and aired on Vermont PBS.
"Elegies," the video Killacky made with movement artist Eiko Otake, is a kind of generational mirror image of Bourgeois' work that memorializes both his mother and Otake's. Killacky has been making videos, alone or collaboratively, since 1993. In this case, Brian Stevenson, production manager at Vermont PBS, helped produce the nine-and-a-half-minute work. First Killacky, then Otake, faces the camera and speaks directly to his or her absent mother, recalling her dying moments and many earlier memories.
These word portraits — spoken love letters — are deeply moving, revealing as much about the speakers as their mothers. Otake, who left Japan at age 20 and stayed away for 46 years, recalls both her mother's last words and the last ones she spoke to her mother, which she repeats in English and Japanese. "Did you hear me?" she wonders aloud.
-Amy Lilly, “Art Review: ‘Love Letters,’ Helen Day Art Center”