welcome, double agent

Charged in the Name of Terror: portraits by contemporary artists , a series of experimental documentaries produced by Paul Chan, investigates the Patriot Act and its impact on traditional American activism. I was also selected to create a video for this series and am currently in the process of editing it.

I have included a preliminary description of the video below:

June 2007

The purported ‘War on Terror’ continues to expand its field of vision; consequently environmentalists are now included within the ranks of suspected terrorists. ‘The Green Scare’ as it is most commonly referred to, consists of several loosely interconnected and independent environmental actions that are now being tried and prosecuted under the Patriot Act as a form of domestic terrorism. Many, with no prior criminal record and without having physically harmed any human being, are now sentenced as ‘terrorists’.

April 10, 2008

The above description was written last summer. I resumed work on the video this January. At this point, what appears most alarming is that many have been awarded sentences that are above and beyond the legal length of sentencing for these specific acts at the time they were committed. In other words, activists committed actions knowing the exact legal repercussions. The Patriot Act overrides pre-existing laws for crimes committed before its inception. It sets a legal precedent. So that, if , as concerned citizens, we choose to protest what appears to be a breach of justice (taking into account that we knowingly may serve an ordained amount of time in jail) , we may find ourselves prosecuted within a framework that never existed when we made our decision to resist perceived injustice.

January 12, 2009

Because the original form of the script is a radio play, Sweet Cowardice will initially be just that. Julia Shirar is completing the sound by the end of January.

This Dream; This Frequency. 4 AM micro-radio transmitters, mp3 players, antennae, and audio files.

Exhibited at:

Hopeless and Otherwise, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, May 2008

Feeltank, Patho-geographies, Gallery 400, Chicago, 2007

Drive By Performance Series, Link’s Hall, Chicago, 2006.

Fragments of soldiers’ nocturnal dreams mixed with Mesopatamian nightmares will be broadcast by micro radio transmitters located in four different locations within a city neighborhood. As cyclists, pedestrians or drivers navigate a preordained route, they will be able to tune into the station and listen to the dream until they have passed out of range. What has coagulated in the dreaming mind of a soldier will be mechanically leaked into the ether, the causeway of the public’s consciousness.

The contemporary dreams were collected by Mary Walling Blackburn from soldiers stationed in Iraq. The dreams from Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) were found in a library book at the University of Chicago. Archeologists unearthed fragments of clay tablets inscribed with dreams that had disturbed their dreamer. According to the book, nightmares were often ritually “disposed of” by copying the dream into clay and then destroying the dried text.

The earliest iteration of this work was made possible by Tony Bayles, Joaquin Viera and Andrew Sonnenshein. The latest is indebted to Valerie Imus.

She Doesn’t Know Its Shape, textile, run of ten. (2002)

Perhaps you are able to conjure up the geo-political boundaries of Iraq––that is, how it appears on a world map. The chances of recognition are greater now then ever… recognition through bombing…knowledge via invasion. But still, I find there are many who do not know Iraq’s shape: “Texas? Alaska? Somewhere in Africa?” is a common response when faced with its unlabeled perimeters. Strangely, we are for and against actions in places we cannot recognize.

What if this instance of blindness, this place of not knowing is a lush opportunity to instigate dialogue? Dialogue, because our internal and eternal monologues about this war eventually numb, shrink, and deaden our ability to speak. And act. And what of a dialogue that temporarily abandons words in favor of the starkly visual? And what of spoken words trailing the visual, transforming abstractions into solid places and flesh and breath interaction?

This simple geo-political garment was created in collaboration with a tailor shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The boundaries of Iraq have been stitched on to the front of formal clothing (read: not t-shirts). There are no accompanying slogans or data. The image is roughly 7 by 5 inches and the color of the thread is dependent on the color of the shirt.

Despite the availability and cost effectiveness of t-shirts, they are already too much of the fashion vernacular of protest. A more formal selection undermines common assumptions about how we design for protest and how we dress to communicate. This element of surprise allows me to imagine that an outline of Iraq could potentially surface on any garment on any body in the crowd, a textile apparition, a geo-political ghost made material.

[Ultimately ten were made, ranging from a baby's 'onesie' to a man's sweater vest. By now, 2008, people recognize the shape of Iraq.]

Spook (still), running time: 5:00 (2006)

Shot on the grounds of Olana, a 19th century mansion, New York during a residency at Catwalk.

Appearing in the background of a landscaped hill, a creature performs a shaking little dance and sings an old southern song, eventually appearing in the foreground only to pull her shirt off her head and reveal her human face.

This performance was created a year after my great aunt confessed that much of my family’s racial anxiety stemmed from the fact that our family wasn’t as white as they hoped to be. Old photographs revealed another history. My great-great grandmother, Lily, and her brother, were clearly not white.

My family, on my mother’s maternal side, were sharecroppers from West Helena, Arkansas who picked cotton into the 1950’s; many of the women sang and my Great Great grandfather, who was named Word, was a sharecropper and a musician. The song the creature barely articulates in the video, entitled “Shortn’n”, was sung to my mother by my great-grandmother.

Like another kind of song, repeated again and again, over the years, the story of my great-grandfather, Jewell, is retold. Him, slathering his hand and arm in black grease, and hiding under their newlywed bed. He grabbed my great-grandmother’s bare pale ankle once she settled down to sleep. This form of racist blackface performed with and on the body of a woman who both participants know isn’t exactly white is difficult to analyze. Reportedly, my great grandmother, Fanella, roused the house with her screams. For me, in that instant, there are two sort of screams happening at once- the fear of assault and the fear of revelation

Did our family succeed in expunging race… because I’m not so convinced that culture is entirely bound by skin. Are we haunted by what we half-buried? What weird white creature appears in our wake? I staged this performance at the site of a mansion, whose original owner, tore up the ground and reshaped it, replacing every plant and tree, until the view he desired, decades later, was achieved.

This video is part of a larger series on how landscape is often a site for both psychological and literal escape and was funded by the Bronx Council of the Arts, specifically the Longwood Arts Project/ Digital Matrix Commissions Program.

Do not knock (still), running time: 5:00 (2006)

Shot in Catskill, New York during a residency at Catwalk.

A small woman unchanges and changes back again underneath a temporary fort strung from desk to chair in an old carriage-house. Her gestures: hesitant, deliberate, civil.

“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation…Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly…What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden?”- from Minima Moralia

This video is part of a larger series on how landscape is often a site for both psychological and literal escape and was funded by the Bronx Council of the Arts, specifically the Longwood Arts Project/ Digital Matrix Commissions Program.

Man-Made (still), running time: 3:00 (2006)

Shot in Catskill, New York during a residency at Catwalk.

A woman runs around a man-made pond over and over again. She struggles with reception on her cell phone as she runs. Frogs sing and scatter.

This video is part of a larger series on how landscape is often a site for both psychological and literal escape and was funded by the Bronx Council of the Arts, specifically the Longwood Arts Project/ Digital Matrix Commissions Program.

“The First Disappointment”, non-permit public performance, scrapyard, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2006. In relationship to a residency at Contemporary Artists’ Center.

created by Mary Walling Blackburn, Danyel Ferrari, and Christopher Marianetti

A suite of octophonic songs. . . composed for a social dance that takes place within a circle created by eight vehicles and inspired by a collection of pseudo-apocolyptic events 19th century sometimes referred to as “The Great Disappointment.”

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Review: (Village Voice, August 22nd, 2006) “The drivers, their passengers, and residents of the town danced to the uncanny music, in the center of a circle illuminated by headlights. While the performance piece, inspired in part by similar dance parties held throughout Texas in the 1960s, was meant to be experienced, the home video is both touching and a bit eerie.”

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Joel Dean painted “The Great Disappointment” as a still, diurnal twin to “The First Disappointment”.

Deerbed (still), running time: 3:00 (2006)

Shot in Catskill, New York during a residency at Catwalk.

The grasses are battened down because the deer sleep here at night. A woman is cocooned in its center. She unfurls and then curls in again.

This video is part of a larger series on how landscape is often a site for both psychological and literal escape and was funded by the Bronx Council of the Arts, specifically the Longwood Arts Project/ Digital Matrix Commissions Program.

Laced: A Greenpoint Supper, Mary Walling Blackburn with Sameer Kapoor. At NGC 224, April 10, 2006.

A large packing crate is filled with contaminated soil dug from the banks of New Town Creek, a dirt that is saturated with oil and other introduced particulate matter. Greenpoint is the site of the largest US oil spill and this northern end of Greenpoint just recently shut down a plant that manufactured plastic bags. Occasionally a wind smelling of human shit blows through this terrain. The sewage facility is that close.

As the diners sit facing away from each other at separate tables, the crate is busted open, the wood removed. The artist excavates the soil cube, pulling out a meal’s worth of sealed jars that have been buried within it for a week. The jars are rinsed, placed on the table, opened and its contents are removed and served to the guests. They are given the option to eat or not (they accept). While they consume, Blackburn and Kapoor lecture each diner about the history of Greenpoint and write directly on the tablecloth excerpts from interviews with local residents who, in fact, grow their food in their backyard and eat it.

The American Index of False Memory (AIFM), a set of 24 drawings, gathers from both personal and national applications of False Memory Syndrome. An A–Z rolodex inscribed with crude and sometimes ghostly pencil drawings illustrates the remains of one woman’s potentially false memories of an American life, sometimes discordant and disembodied, sometimes lovely and light.