Laura Mackin’s show at Contemporary Art Workshop is based on “imagery from strangers,” she says. “When you find someone’s videos or pictures, they seem mysterious at first, and then you wind up imagining the intentions of the people who made them.” The origin of this exhibit is a home video she bought at a thrift store while she was an undergrad at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Rabbits, squirrels, cartoons, etc.” was scribbled on the box, and the time-stamping indicated the video had been taken over a 12-day period in 1992. The videographer panned animals in a backyard frenetically; these segments are interspersed with brief interludes, some showing cartoons on TV and others the anonymous video maker himself. She and her friends loved it. “We all thought it was his first day with the camera, his first video–it had that intensity of looking, that pleasure,” she says. “He’ll be hyperfocused on a particular animal, then cut to something else. He can’t seem to hold the camera straight he’s so excited.”
