welcome, double agent

Black Divine Light
Mary Walling Blackburn
3:15

A hand-held video camera makes record of a black mirror that is alternately reflecting a violent summer storm and the opening between a woman’s legs. The mirror, conceived of by Walling Blackburn, is a contemporary riff on the Claude Glass, an 18th century European framing device made of black glass and intended to concentrate one’s gaze on the landscape. The blackness of this mirror and the darkness of the storm swallows the light and our ability to discern the details of the vagina.

“In 1969, twelve women met during a women’s liberation conference. In a workshop on “women and their bodies,” they talked about their own experiences with doctors and shared their knowledge about their bodies. The fruit of their discussions and research was a course booklet entitled Women and Their Bodies, a stapled newsprint edition published in 1970. The booklet, which put women’s health in a radically new political and social context, become an underground success.” – Our Bodies Ourselves

Throughout the 70’s, a latter version, entitled “Our Bodies Ourselves” was a staple in counter-culture households throughout the United States. Walling Blackburn, as a child, became fixated by the black and white photo of a woman with a mirror between her legs and a text urging the naked woman to know herself and love what she saw. Last spring, a lecture on “The Designer Vagina” was advertised; a surgeon would discuss the rise of vaginal cosmetic surgery. The striking shifts in perception from the 1970’s to the 00’s indicates the indeterminacy of the object or rather, that object. It holds so much, but wait… its tooo dark to tell what its holding.

A blanket fort, constructed in a country barn, at times, appears to be almost levitating. Flies land on the fabric rifled by invisible winds. A naked woman defiles the fort, entering the fort from behind. Eventually she disappears; the blankets settle; windows open and the forest is visible.

(This work is a triptych, requiring three projectors. Each screen runs at a different length. Consequently, the alignment, aural and visual, shifts.)

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.

This Thief (still), running time: 7:00 (2006)

Shot in North Adams, Massachusetts on the Hoosic River.

A young woman steals a shopping cart and hurls it over a bridge. She clambers down to the river and climbs into the shopping cart, nestled within the wire frame and the rushing water. [Note: Satanic symbols are spray-painted under the bridge.]

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.

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.

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.