Video Art & Experimental Film by Jay Sims

X-Rae in Pink

• Date: 1994
• Medium: 35mm color film, digitally refined
• Format: Proofs only

X-Rae in Pink is a photographic work created in 1994 using an inexpensive Chinese 35mm film stock that possessed coarse grain, elevated contrast, and unusual color rendering. Rather than functioning as a limitation, these qualities became integral to the aesthetic of the piece, lending the image a slightly unstable, ‘dodgy’ character that resonated with the artist’s early interest in imperfect surfaces and nonstandard materials.

The layered motion effect and double exposure were produced entirely in-camera, using intentional movement and extended exposure to create a fractured, time-shifted portrait. Later digital refinement was limited to color correction and minor cleanup, preserving the analog irregularities central to the work’s original character.

The resulting image shows a figure whose form splits and drifts across exposures, the doubled faces and semi-transparent body enacted as a kind of temporal slippage. The vivid pink of the subject’s hair cuts through the film’s grain and chromatic drift, anchoring the otherwise dissolving figure.

In this shifting portrait, identity appears momentary rather than fixed, shaped as much by gesture and motion as by the quirks of the fragile film stock itself. X-Rae in Pink anticipates themes that recur throughout the artist’s later moving-image practice: temporal fracture, embodiment as multiplicity, and the delicate boundary between what the image reveals and what it lets slip away.