43

43 is a visual poem and self-portrait built around misdirection and barrier. The film presents a body in quiet meditation, holding a glowing vessel above water, the full scene withheld until the work is ready to reveal it. Drawing from Rebecca Solnit's writing on bodies "dissected and reconstructed by light and machine," the piece places the body as it might daily be experienced, then undoes that familiarity through the apparatus of film itself. The accompanying poem takes its name from the Psalms, sitting in the silence between "Why are you cast down, O my soul" and "Put your hope in God," asking whether that pivot from despair to hope was a shout of triumph or an exhausted whisper. The poem and the film are inseparable, one work in two forms.