Sea Oak

Sea Oak is based on a short story by George Saunders published in 2000, which is titled after a housing estate: ‘At Sea Oak there’s no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx.’ The film is a 51-minute projection of blackness. Highlighting the slippage between words and the things they represent, only the projector – the conveyor, here, of language rather than images – is illuminated in the darkened gallery space. It is accompanied by edited recordings of interviews that Wardill conducted with a left-wing Californian think tank, The Rockridge Institute, which researched the employment of metaphor and framing in contemporary political rhetoric – making the work a natural sequel to Sick Serena (2007). The film begins with the voice of an American man discussing the ways in which we think in prototypes before analyzing how language conjures disparate, subjective images – something exploited, of course, by politicians.