Stay Away, Come Closer
San Francisco, California 2011
Stay Away, Come Closer is a beautiful, dark circus populated with imitators. It is glamorous and sinister like Hollywood horror or tragicomic theater. It’s mock. A tornado has hit a costume trailer and a coyote is left watching. He acts as an agent, the ultimate border-crosser cum trickster, jumping between wilderness and civilization, human and animal worlds and from real time to theatrical time. Coyote shows up to represent human relationships to the politics of the wilderness and the politics of cultural hierarchies. Prolific and notorious, you can worship him as your sexually promiscuous creator god, turn to him to illegally drive you over to the promise land, or futilely try to eliminate his presence as a varmint in the ranchscape. In Stay Away, Come Closer, coyote stands above his decoy lake contemplating theories of evolution, definitions of contemporary wilderness and the potentials of disguise for shamanic reasons or just for fun. It speaks to the human as human and the human as animal. Drumming up desire for the difficult, it positions itself at the site of primal conflict. Let’s make a movie right… here. This is the place where humans are embracing their civilized warm beds and, by turns, longing for pre-linguistic growling. It resides in the border places, uncovering the crossover between what is elementally human and what, in essence, remains wild.