Proud Mary

Repeats is a slide show film set to a soundtrack of answering-machine messages, accompanied by sequenced photographs that repeat and re-stage images from film history. Eleven narratives make up the work, each featuring the person who left the corresponding voice message. The work takes many of its cues from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the landmark experimental film composed almost entirely of still images — and one of several films ripped off here. Made in 2000, Repeats is itself a sequel — or repeat — of Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s earlier work The Ballad of Technological Dependency (1998), which was heavily indebted to the photography of Nan Goldin and William Yang, who appears in Repeats.

The Ballad of Technological Dependency combines answering-machine messages with portraits of the friends who left them. Influenced by Nan Goldin and William Yang, the work blurs fact and fiction, using real people, messages and memories to construct its own narrative. Artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham made a sequel, Repeats, in 2000.