Ashley Hunt's "SALT" is a 29 minute experimental video, dealing with identity and mimesis, memory and history, routes and paths taken by both people and commerce, and the persistence of a historic colonial world within the modern city. The video is composed of two parallel narratives, one historical and one contemporary. The historical narrative features a body of photographs from the artist's estranged grandfather, documenting his years traveling the world as a working class radio operator on a merchant marine ship. These photos are montaged together with found footage portraying ocean voyages, "colonial adventures," and class-conscious portrayals of sailors' lives. Sutured by a voice reading fictionalized letters written to someone back home, it forms a loose narrative, into which the artist inserts himself, pictured a liminal, perhaps psychological space, performing signifiers of a past -- perhaps latent -- masculinity and "whiteness" summoned by the grandfather's photos. The contemporary narrative follows the artist through the city, on his way to somewhere, as if looking for something. Throughout the footage of his own "traveling," we see vestiges of colonial mythologies written across the city's signs and markers, recalling dreams of travel, exotic cuisines and products of trade. As his character moves through the city, these references to otherness and freedom through mobility appear to circumscribe the city's own routes of movement, and we are reminded of the historical narrative as the character stops repeatedly to take his own photographs of men and workers throughout the city, highlighting the labor of the man pictured in the historical photographs. The liminal, performative space in which the artist's character appears to engage both narratives, seems to connect the two, acting as a link between their common references to identity, history, performance and a colonized social space in which trade, commerce and work seem to dictate the routes one can take, and the mapping of their own identity.

This two-minute excerpt will be replaced by a longer clip soon.