As early as 2000, Fast’s 20-minute looped video "Glendive Foley" separated a succession of filmed ’post-cards’ of suburban houses in the US (following one another on one screen) from the soundtrack (the production of which is shown on a second screen, broken up into a grid of sub-frames). This second screen captures the artist wearing headphones and recording his voice mimicking birdsong, the buzz of insects and the sound of the wind: sound without words is used as the out-of-frame context for the blank houses. As impenetrable as still images (recalling Dan Graham’s Homes for America, 1966), the shots of the houses nonetheless remind us, through minor incidents (a child, for example, passes on a bike) that this is film. The introduction of a temporal dimension into the image recalls, furthermore, the long-exposure of early photography, often staged in cemeteries, which required the subject to remain still. This tradition of the pose, like that of the tableau vivant – evoked in the casting, in the historical reconstruction and in the after-life at the embalmer’s – is a question that haunts Fast’s work, which is as concerned with the ’passing of the image’ as with the pausing of images. (Elisabeth Lebovici, "From Homer to Omer Fast", Afterall)
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