What the Present Does
Though I wasn’t conscious of this linkage when curating our Winter 2026 issue, on subsequent review I realized all three films incorporate split screens. Though the video essays and cinepoems in this issue are tonally and formally different from one another, there is a preoccupation with doubling throughout each one – sometimes for a mirroring effect, but also to create a dialectic between the two moving images that generates a new idea or visual polyphony. I love thinking of each of these works as pieces that invite you through the looking glass: of commerce, time, or desire. These films will haptically, intellectually, and emotionally touch you, as well as open up new ways of seeing with kaleidoscopic brilliance and formal prowess.
Ashley Dailey’s exquisite collage film What the Present Does (2025) is a ruminative meditation on inheritance, loss, and the passage of seasons. At the very beginning, we hear the faint rustling of pages, an aural cue that primes us for the narrative Dailey subsequently will share. Occasionally utilizing split screens or time lapses, Dailey’s deft formal moves never quite sync with her voice over, thus creating a sense of time folding in on itself when she later verbally calls attention to visual moves from a minute before. “I live like the world is loud and the snow is gone,” Dailey says. “Like choices have rarely belonged to me.” Thank goodness for the choices throughout What the Present Does which remind us how grateful we are “to wait for something to happen” in the interstitial spaces of an affecting work like Dailey’s.
