IDK
IDK is about constructing narratives and nonsense. A nearly illegible love story—one of the more common narratives, a most common form of nonsense. The broken syntax of the poem in layout and the visual reference to a dictionary destroys definition and makes plain how we invent meaning in romantic narratives where we are often choosing and changing our minds.
The text of the poem is hand transferred to a bed sheet designed to look like a misprinted dictionary page. There are no spaces between the words and 12 models are imposed on the sheet in a collage of shapes and combinations making the text into a background. The audio allows you to experience a reading of the poem while the video visually unpacks the intentionally obtuse text. The title, IDK, offers a metanarrative that reveals the theme of disillusioned love and fickle decision making.
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Chelsea Werner-JatzkeDirector
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Chelsea Werner-JatzkeWriter
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Shaun KardinalPhotographer
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Shaun KardinalEditor
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Project Type:Experimental, Short
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Genres:video poetry, video art, installation poetry
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Runtime:5 minutes 17 seconds
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Completion Date:January 1, 2016
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Country of Origin:United States
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Country of Filming:United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:9:16
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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TUF LUV, King Street StationSeattle
February 2, 2016
North American Premier -
Love is So Wierd, CairoSeattle
February 14, 2016 -
VertifilmsPrague
Czech Republic
August 23, 2023 -
Bizarrya Short Film FestivalPorto
Portugal
March 15, 2023 -
FLIGHT/ Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di GenovaGenova
Italy
October 20, 2023 -
Aotearoa Poetry Film FestivalWellington
New Zealand
November 2, 2023 -
Festival FotogeniaMexico City
Mexico
November 22, 2023
Finalist
An artist exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is the author of two chapbooks and has fiction, reviews, and poetry published widely. Her interest in how words can be experienced has led to solo work and collaborations with artists across media to create multimedia literary readings, gallery installations, classical music performances, broadsides, karaoke, and video poetry. She is co-founder and director of Cadence Video Poetry Festival at Northwest Film Forum and co-curator of Good Symptom: An Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances (The 3rd Thing, 2023-2024).
Shaun Kardinal is a Seattle-based conceptual artist creating form from repeating parts. Using alteration, conglomeration, and curation, his mixed-media practice manifests as modular structures, collaborative platforms, web-exclusive exhibitions, and interactive physical-digital installations. His work has exhibited from Seattle to New York City to London and in between. He is the recipient of two grants from 4Culture, has served as a member of SOIL, an artist-run gallery, was an organizational member of Crawl Space Gallery, and co-founder of Some Space Gallery.
This piece was created over several months. In 2015, I was selected to take part in a collaborative arts incubator at Cornish College of the Arts. Here, I created the prop for the video—a bed sheet covered in the text of the poem. The letters were transferred to the bed sheet by many hands during an open house event. This space was also the photo studio for the models. During an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center the photography of the many models was completed. This project would not have been possible without Shaun Kardinal's photography and editing.