Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay & Aleesa Cohene, The Same Problem | 2009 | 5min | DV | Canada
Every time he woke up, it was the same problem. An ambiguous call and response is enacted between a roaring, stormy ocean and a solitary figure whose wailing lament is fashioned from ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ sampled from pop music. The ocean, too, is a composite of footage from diverse film sources, a catalogue of storms remembered or imagined. Like a siren the singer howls at his sublime interlocutor until his voice is engulfed, overwhelmed and silenced.
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Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born artist, diarist and aspiring bon-vivant. Since 2000 his work has brought together song, self-reflexive performance and song lyrics as vehicles for examining the singing voice, the untranslatability of emotions into language and the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture.
Nemerofsky Ramsay’s video work has screened in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at the Hamburg Short Film Festival, the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm-und Videofest and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (all in Germany), the Avanca Festival (Portugal), the Toronto Inside Out Film and Video Festival (Canada), as well as First Prize at the Globalica Media Arts Biennale (Poland). His work is part of numerous private collections and the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He currently divides himself between Canada and Europe.
