Video > The Wilderness, 2017

The Wilderness (project statement)
The Wilderness 2017 is a single-channel video looped 4:03 minutes with sound (field recording).

​​The Wilderness is a meditation on the relationship of place to human emotion. As we revisit a site, our standing memory becomes scripted with new memory. In this view, a site can become a depository of stray feelings that accumulate but simultaneously dissipate.

My work explores the presence and absence of the body as a means of transmitting memory, longing, and the unseen forces that shape our relationship to place. I am drawn to the way landscapes act as silent witnesses—how they hold traces of past inhabitants and serve as repositories of messages, both literal and metaphoric. Absence itself becomes a form of communication, a dispatch from what once was or what remains just beyond perception.

I am particularly interested in the ways environments shape consciousness and how the relationship between people and place is symbiotic. Landscapes, whether natural or constructed, transmit signals—through decay, regrowth, or transformation. The marks left behind by time, weather, and human intervention become messages sent across generations. My black-and-white photography heightens these contrasts, emphasizing what is revealed versus what remains obscured.

Through this work, I explore how landscapes and bodies communicate through presence and erasure. In doing so, I consider what it means to send a message—whether as a deliberate act or as an imprint left unknowingly. My images function as transmissions, carrying echoes of past and future narratives, waiting for the viewer to receive them.

One authorized copy is in Permanent Collection with the City of Raleigh, Art Collection.

Limited Edition official copies available.
Inquire joy.tirade@gmail.com

Recent Screenings
2025 - Play Shorts - Official Selection
2024 - Compulsion, screening: The Wilderness, Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, GA
2024 - The Great Film Club, screening: The Wilderness, Artist Television Access, San Francisco, CA
2023 - Aphelion Film Festival, Italy, screening: The Wilderness, HD Color Video + Field Recording
2023 - Best Eco Cinema, Aphelion Film Festival
2018 - Contemporary Landscapes, screening: The Wilderness, HD Video, CICA Museum, Gyeonggi-do, S. Korea
2017 - Lump, Raleigh, NC, as part of Digiscapes!
2018 - CICA Museum in South Korea, “Contemporary Landscapes.”