‘and after that what changes’ is a new video by Neven Lochhead shot in Gatineau, Québec in 2016. Over the past year, while living in Syracuse and Los Angeles, Lochhead has been developing strategies for producing work that allows for his content to always remain open. When constructing his images, the notion of there ever being a final edit of the sequence is kept at a distance—an ambivalence toward closure that he says permits a more loving behavior to play out in the work.

The imagery in this new piece covers the span of one full day and night spent in the woods along the Gatineau River, with the changing of natural light being detected gradually over its duration. On top of these images, Lochhead takes the strange linguistic events of proper names as his primary instrument. Evoking a credits sequence, names are played over the images with varying degrees of density, movement, and volume, creating a suspended drama of nouns without a reference. Some names will appear in groups, suggesting a nascent form of collectivity. Others flash on the screen as single entities, inviting speculation about the possible lives to which they are/were/will be attached. Hundreds of names appear throughout the full length of the piece, all of which have been invented by the artist through a process of mutating and mixing preexisting names. As the names in the piece anticipate the context and community in which it is being viewed, they attempt to expand and collapse the proximities of familiarity taking place with the imagined viewer. Do you by chance know a Catt Rabalsky? Flora Kellers? Thames de Garde? Nevone Lugbed? “And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and after that and what changes after that.” —from Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation