Night Swells

In Zachary Epcar's fragmentary, soap opera-esque film, lounge music, lamps, coffee pods, and other accoutrements of modern life restage a story of domestic dreams and nightmares.

The canyon is more of a state of mind than a place, really. The architecture here is the architecture of dreams. The infrastructure, an infrastructure of desiring flows. The canyon is community. It is one single resonant tone moving through all bodies at all times.

In Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.

A constellation of objects, each emerging into the soft peach-light void of an indeterminate condominium space.

Near-future leisure time activities and anxieties as a series of minor incidents continually interrupted, alternating between an overcrowded virtual space and a virtually abandoned city space.

"But beware, if morality should penetrate beneath the skin, and the pink be not quite moral enough to prevent the eruption of desires!" - Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses

In this serene study of lost love and natural light, parked cars in public spaces become sanctuaries for emotional renewal. Paired with reflective voiceover and strangely comforting self-help recordings, Zachary Epcar’s casually inventive images, highlighting sun-baked glass and asphalt surfaces, imbue the mid-afternoon heat with the promise of a better tomorrow.

An expanded view of the lunch crowd at an open-air restaurant, from a bird's eye of the exterior to the depths of the interior.