In this very short, simple piece, a spotlight is moved over a jar of American coins. The glare of the light blossoms and fades over the curves of quarters and pennies, shot using a tiny CCTV wireless camera. There’s something paradoxical about the treatment of the money in this video. The piece is fetishistic, fixating on the shiny surfaces of the coins in the light; the tiny camera makes the coins seem larger than in reality. The passage of the light over the coins seems to suggest something far removed from money, something almost celestial: a ‘transit’, of course, is the apparent passage of one astral body in front of another in the night sky. However, the dirty degraded images, the burnt-out glare and the dark recesses of the pile also imply something unpleasant about this pile of American small change. As the position of the light changes, so does the amount of light bouncing back at the lens. The camera’s aperture changes automatically, altering the depth of field, and transforming the focus of areas of the image into and out of abstraction.
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