THRESHOLD : VIdeo (14:22 and 21:37 edits) and site-responsive installation

Threshold is a video work by the artist duo Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler / Morris) that is designed for site-responsive video installations (14:22 loop). It was originally commissioned by the American Writers Museum in Chicago for an installation titled Palm: All Awake in the Darkness by Sayler / Morris with Ian Boyden. In 2020 during the COVID pandemic, Sayler/Morris made a special longer and more purely meditative edit of this piece for The Merwin Conservancy, titled Threshold (Meditation Edit for Merwin Conservancy; 21:57 loop). See that version here.

In both versions of Threshold, the video was shot entirely in and around a small room that the poet W.S. Merwin built for meditation at his home in Maui. This room sits in the middle of a palm garden that Merwin and his wife Paula grew on a wasteland left by colonial plantations. Tree-by-tree, they transformed the land into what Merwin called a “garden that aspires to be a forest.” The title of Sayler/Morris’ video work is taken from one of Merwin’s poems of the same name. In that poem, Merwin wrote: “what did I have to do with anything I could remember / all I did not know went on beginning around me…” 

Credits:

Concept, direction and editing: Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler / Morris)
Sound design: Matthew Patterson Curry and Sayler / Morris
Videography: Sayler / Morris
Additional videography: Lauren Harper
Color correction and additional editing: Andrew Rice
Project Consultants: Julie Gawendo, Harvey Bernstein, Steve Meyer, Mary Lock , Stephen Young, John Burnham Schwartz, Michael Wiegers, Hal Crimmel, Alexandra Batorsky and Michael Wutz.

With support from: The Poetry Foundation, Syracuse University, The Merwin Conservancy

Meditation Edit Produced by Sara Tekula for the Merwin Conservancy