Life is Perfect

PAUL+A

Featuring Sarah Dowling

2) Man and woman in a hotel room, the man is laid on his back in the bed with pyjama bottoms on. The woman is laid on top of him in the pyjama tops. He has a pillow over his face and the woman has her head on the pillow as if to go to sleep. She smiles a satisfied smile and we notice a knife in her hand and a bloody puncture in the man’s side.

15) Man and woman in a hotel room, the woman is laid on the floor in a state of undress. She has a skirt on which is up around her thighs. The man in a similar state, is laid limp on the floor with his arms in an awkward position. His head is up the woman’s skirt and between her thighs. The woman is a trained dancer.

46) Man and woman in a hotel room, the man is laid on the bed naked looking very warm, the woman has gone for a cool shower. On returning, looking cold and wet she decides to demonstrate to the man the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. With a smile she takes the man in a close embrace and slowly rolls them over in the bed sheet until they are wrapped together very tight. She then demands that he give her the kiss of life. With a deep breath he kisses her until she loses consciousness.

45) Man and woman in a hotel room, the room is strewn with their clothes, bedclothes and pillows from the bed. The man and woman are standing wearing just pants. As the man rips off the last sheet from the bed and it is billowing upwards he suddenly brings it down over the woman’s head and twisting it, chokes and suffocates her.

17) Man and woman in a hotel room, the man is laid naked beside the bed, the woman stands over him in a bathrobe. She has one stiletto shoe on, the other is on the man’s head with the heel dug deep into the man’s eye.

The 50 photographs in this project were made by the artists over a 24hr period in a hotel room, whereby they privately performed 50 love scenes, all of which ended in a passionate sexual murder. Each photographed at the point of death by the protagonist.

At 2pm on the 2nd of October 2004 Paul Jeff and Sarah Dowling – Paul+a booked into a country hotel in mid Wales and took a room for 24hours. Armed with costume, props, a 5×4 camera with flash and 50 written legends equating to theatrical stage directions detailing short performances, the pair proceeded to perform and record photographically 50 love scenes all ending in murder. 50 passionate murders equally shared out in terms of gender (including 2 suicide pacts) and recorded at the instant of death on Polaroid type 55 film. Just over 2 murders an hour for 24 hours. These are performances carried out with no audience in a hotel bedroom with only the camera as witness.

The idea was to collapse the instant of death, the instant of sexual passion and the photographic instant into one hugely dense and significant moment. The two protagonists in the scene are condemned to replay the most significant moment of their lives over and over again as if in an infernal purgatory. The murders however are all different, illustrating the multiple potentialities that could have existed in that one dark instant. A temporal moment that is unfolded to show the other potential scenarios that lie behind it, and create a seriality which is neither linear nor spatial but premised instead on Deleuze’s Liebnitzian ‘baroque’ notion of The Fold, where time stands still and seriality unfolds from a specific moment in a specific place– one event consisting of infinite possibilities.

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