WHAT IF WE KISSED ON THE OPERATING TABLE (2025)
What If We Kissed On The Operating Table is a short film that takes place in a mysterious facility where women with unspecified mental issues receive a violently invasive treatment that creates clone versions of themselves. These clones becomes the patients’ nurses and tend to their needs during their stay at the hospital while they recover from their treatment.
In What If We Kissed On The Operating Table, a patients’ pain is reverse-transmogrified into a clone version of themselves. This clone becomes the patients’ nurse and tends to their needs during their stay at the hospital while they recover from their “operation." And the way a patient treats their clone reflects the way they treat themselves in their daily lives outside of the hospital. For example, someone who normally engages in a lot of self-soothing may need their clone to nurture them, while someone with a penchant for self-harm may ridicule and even torture their clone. In this film, the doppelgänger nurses serve as both balm and battlegrounds for their ailing and needy sires.
At its core, What If We Kissed On The Operating Table’s central theme is transformation, both physical and psychological, for better or for worse. The patients at this facility choose a brutal and visceral procedure in the pursuit of change, self-care, and betterment. Nurses are tasked with creating clones of new patients through a violent ritual that is both unsettling and deeply symbolic. The film is a meditation on the human psyche's labyrinthine nature, depicting the paradoxes of self-love and the struggle to externalize or internalize care, merging dreamlike aesthetics, emotional realism and horror to evoke both discomfort and catharsis.
In the gallery show What If Kissed Kissed On The Operating Table at Keystone Gallery, stills, costumes, set dressing and props from the film are reimagined as sculptural and installation artworks. Visitors will not only watch the film but inhabit the world it creates, interacting with objects imbued with the narrative's psychic residue.
What If Kissed Kissed On The Operating Table was shown at Keystone Gallery in Los Angeles from July 12th to July 20th 2025.
