‘Several Wolves is a direct reference to a chapter from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri’s opus, Milles Plateaux, but refigured conceptually to address the theoretical basis for the Aris Kindt project. Kindt, an anonymous criminal laid bare on an operating table for all the world to see (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp ) can easily elicit a lonely feeling of a solitary and pointless death, but only if we root the image in the context of hierarchy. Looking closer at the image, Rembrandt’s odd use of perspective and the reversal of cadaver’s hand as an anatomical anomaly, we see the painter’s attempt at a union with his subject, creating, in a way, a pack, a multiplicity, freeing Kindt from the confines of the painting and even his fate. Rembrandt is communicating with him through us, the viewer of the painting, allowing the pack of wolves to grow infinitely and across time. D&G state that there ‘only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage : packs in masses and masses in packs’, referring, mostly simply, to the fact there is no singular structure or root that defines personhood, dreams, or memories. The video for Several Wolves meets this head on with a series of scenes from a home movie interrupted or interfaced with a seemingly bizarre image of girl with and without clown make up. Memory as a material substance is not synonymous with nostalgia. Its messy. Its ungrounded. It moves in packs with no reason other than survival. Nostalgia is an attempt to package memory neatly, to root it, to capture it for a long enough time so that behavior can be more easily mapped by corporate demagogues designing a future (product) made just for you. That ‘warm and fuzzy’ you’re feeling is merely innovative product development for a never satiated consumer bound by the roots of a memory that is not even your own.’
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