FOUR HANDS

Four small flat panel screens mounted on a shelf display moving images of four pairs of hands. Shot with a black-and-white low-light camera, the hands of a young boy, a middle-aged woman and man, and an elderly woman are seen as they slowly and deliberately form a series of predetermined gestures. The gestures are both familiar and strange, influenced by a variety of sources from Buddhist mudras to seventeenth-century English chirologia tables. The symbolic patterns of the motions of three generations of hands—son, mother and father, grandmother—describe a timeline that encompasses both the parallel actions of the individuals in the present moment and the larger movements of the stages of human life.