Collaborative video with Kolbe Roper & Roman Udalov

Toban Nichols’ statement about the work:

The video represents a metaphorical depiction of an unraveling relationship, but also acts as a comedic sidebar with badly written and flatly spoken porn lines standing in for actual communication while doing mundane domestic tasks.

Layers of the relationship are displayed by monotone speech and “going through the motions” on the surface, with bubbling emotions, wants and needs, underneath. Both build up to the piece’s off-screen climax that is left to the viewer’s imagination. A question remains: what happened next?

The piece is interspersed with moments of evaluation, contemplation, & rest in between the domestic scenes. These act as memories or meditations on the underlying tension. In the last scene, the back and forth conversation becomes intense and repetitive, building to a magical, mysterious climax. The final scene presents each individual bringing their own wishes and desires to the literal and figurative table, but it seems, like two opposing magnets, the two don’t match up,  they are incompatible.

Kolbe Roper’s statement about the work:

Creating Yarn Mountain was based, for myself, in how a relationship becomes solace and banal. This film is a piece of a larger conversation on interaction and intimacy between gay men. What you see and expect can become common and thus loosing the erotic euphoria of personal connection. How gay men operate as a presentation to the community and how they operate in the privacy of home? How to couples stay together and how does intimacy develop or a become common place in the structure of the relationship and running through the motions. I feel this video begins a conversation on the ending of a relationship and what keeps them together and why.

Roman Udalov’s statement about the work:

My goal, as the director and collaborator was to capture the domestic situation, the vibrancy of the house and the elements that make up a home. Even though the home now is more of a shell these two dwell in, rather than a loving place they share, I wanted to capture the scenario of intertwined lives being led, but also making clear that while this was the home of people in love, it’s now a shell of monotony. The lovely burial ground of a dead relationship full of avoidance, a disconnected juxtaposition of color and light w/ bored, non-emotional communication not making real connections, only verbal intonations and separate lives. I wanted to show the broken relationship, the deterioration, the disuse. I felt it was of significant importance that only the mouths and other fragments were shown at the end, like that’s all that’s left. No physical connection, two islands drowning with no lifeline.