The flow of consciousness and movement of the face

Miloš Šejn (1947) pursues his lifelong project of interacting with nature, examining the relationship of his embodied mind and landscape through a multitude of genres and media – from painting and drawing to body art, performance, photography, video, scientific experiments and site specific installations, often using his own body as the primary pictorial medium. He began using video as a means to record his performances and actions in landscape, after several decades of photographing and experimenting with film. Javořím potokem (Mlaka / Through a Maple Creek) is a short sequence extracted from a much longer tape, documenting his journey and performance in the stream in Giant Mountains (Krkonoše) on 17 July 1999 and slowed down by 95%. It belongs to a group of early documentary videos from 1996–99, essentially a raw footage, which was laying dormant for years as a study material, not intended for any presentation.
This early video already anticipates the key theme of the photographic and videoperformances which Šejn has been making during the last decade and in which he sought to transform his fleeting body sculptures into some sort of a permanent audio-visual record of body – namely the drama of the transient moments of micro-interaction of body with the landscape and the natural world. His photographs and video arrest the ephemeral, seemingly trivial moments the existence of which one hardly realises in the flow of movement and action, but which constitute the very basis of Šejn’s contacts with the earth, water and air. The moments of mutual interaction – the body leaving its imprint on the surface or in the space of the landscape, and the forces of nature leaving marks on the surface of the body and – through it – in the consciousness, are acted out in his videos and photographs as spectacular and visually stunning stories: cascades of bubbles forming around the face and body becoming one with water, thin threads of breath arranged into spectral sculptures in the cold air, the moment when a fire-fly touches down on skin. Such reciprocal contacts are captured in Šejn’s works as image-moments of mysterious beauty.
Among the most noteworthy of such moments are faces submerged in water, a  motif which first appears in Through Javoří stream, only to be continually explored in later works. In the slowed-down foot-age, one sees what to all appearance looks immobile – a face in sleep or death – only gradually beginning to register its minimal life-pulse. The effect of slow motion in capturing facial expression has been extensively used by Bill Viola in the above-mentioned series Passions, allowing him to explore the temporal dimension of affect. Shot on high-speed film, later digitally convert-ed into a radically decelerated video, his dissections of affect bring to the realm of visible what escapes the normal time-course of human perception. For Viola, “emotions exists somewhere outside of time.” In Šejn’s video, the slowed-down motion likewise allows the viewer to dwell on the microevents below the threshold of normal perception. Unlike Viola’s staged emotional out-burst, here, however, the micromovements of the face convey merely ‘the drama’ of state of mind and body underneath the mountain stream. In the space of the image, the surface of the water merges with the surface of the face into one – a live membrane, whose movements are shaped by tiny ripples of the water from the outside and by the breath from within. And perhaps also by the flow of consciousness, a state of mind in the moment of his submerged existence – something Šejn tried to capture in his ex-post verbal commentary on this ‘situation’:
“…when de facto, my face and body become a face of water, face of that stream in the valley of enormous massive of Black mountain…it is also the situation of an interval between life and death, when the human life cyclically transforms into another life. Interface of the water surface is that pulsing membrane between the forces of nature… .the last thing to remain as the boundaries dissolve is the shape of breath and an awareness that I breathe is the last thing to tie me with a space ‘in between’.”
Šejn’s later videoperformances and staged body sculptures present innumerable transformations of body and face – submerged, fused with water, vegetation, earth and rock, transformed into strange portraits or protean monsters. These are not mere records of communication between body/mind and the nature but also a continual testing of ways of making these transient encounters permanent in an aesthetically meaningful artefact.

quote from: Ladislav Kesner: Faces / Phenomenon of faces in video art, 2012, Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague