The Grimsbys are still receiving visitors, though the picture is beginning to deteriorate.
Towers of vintage televisions surround a central arrangement of screens and a pale, elongated face. Medical imagery flickers within the cabinets, while neighboring sets glow with static. The room appears through layers of scratches, stains, drifting marks, and washes of amber, pink, and milky white. At times, these interruptions nearly consume the scene. Then a face, a television, or a fragment of anatomy becomes visible again.
The composition draws our attention toward its center, where the figure presides over the stacked screens like an unusual household portrait. Around it, the accumulated televisions create a dense enclosure of competing images. Their familiar shapes anchor the room even as the shifting surface makes it difficult to see clearly. We recognize the Grimsbys’ surroundings through fragments, holding onto details as they emerge and disappear.
Here, the image itself becomes part of the encounter. Scratches and apparent film damage suggest a recording that has endured repeated handling, an old broadcast surviving imperfectly, or a memory whose details have begun to change. The warm color washes give the room a fleeting softness, while dark speckles and abrupt marks interrupt that intimacy. Access to the scene remains unstable.
Within this interference, the televisions continue their work. Their medical transmissions extend the household’s fascination with science and oddities, offering glimpses beneath the body’s surface even as the larger picture becomes obscured. The piece places these different kinds of visibility in tension: images intended to expose and examine are housed within an image that continually conceals.
The figure’s pale face becomes a point of return. Each time the surrounding textures thin, its presence reasserts itself. Whether we read it as an inhabitant, a specimen, or a familiar object within the room remains uncertain. Its position among the televisions gives it a quiet authority, as though it belongs to the apparatus through which this strange household observes the world.
Karen Jerzyk filmed the scene herself, bringing her handmade character work into a densely layered moving image. The tangible world of costumes, objects, and aging electronics persists beneath the distressed surface, giving the visual interruptions something physical to erode. The result carries the intimacy of a recovered family recording whose subjects remain at home, even when the picture struggles to hold them.
Part of *The Grimsbys*, a moving-image series by Karen Jerzyk exploring a peculiar household’s fondness for science, oddities, and the comforts of its own strange company.
