Work
AUDIO – OLD
November 2011
5 Women
Music made from a map of the stars
Two older projects that are being revisited this month. These audio files have been taken from video works that went up to make instillations.
December 9th 2011: SISTERS OF MERCY
PALE FIRE
A screening of themed artist videos curated by Glasgow based artist Michelle Hannah, under the title of Pale Fire. The title is taken from the 1962 book by Vladimir Nabokov addressing the fictional John Shade’s poem of the same name. The metafiction book is a nine hundred and ninety nine line poem about his life, what may lie beyond death and the supernatural. The novel consists of both the poem and an extensive foreword and commentary on it by the poet’s crazy neighbour, Charles Kinbote. Both poet and editor are wholly Nabokov’s creations.
The themes resolved for Pale Fire are video works based around performance / movement in the literary, myth-making and the metaphysical and existential detachment used as a masquerade.
PALE FIRE features work from; Jon Audarson, Darren Banks, Tom Beddard, Alex Hetherington, Leanne Hopper, Mairi Lafferty & Ash Reid.
BE THE HAMMER OR THE ANVIL
An exhibition at Generator Projects November/December 2010.
The installation included photographs and a new film as well as a pop-up Womens Library in collaboration with Glasgow Womens Library.
courtesy of Ross McLean and Generator Projects
Mairi Lafferty’s video and photography involve a self-conscious fetishization of outmoded mediums and materials. Super 8, grainy and scored surfaces evoke a Benjaminian aura (1936) of the obsolete and the retroactive. The phallic projection of the camera is turned inward and, in doing so, subjectivized. An uncanny hall of mirrors, reflecting a fourth-dimensional infinity, appears between her legs as the artist lays herself bare. She is simultaneously over-exposed, severed, disembodied, embarrassed, revealed and concealed. The void plays on the Freudian role of femininity and is positioned just so. The camera lens is supplanted by the recurrent motif of the black hole or blind spot. Meanwhile her video piece captures her partner under the ink as he acquires a tattoo – a feminine interpretation of the Chris Burden bullet scene. Spelling ABRACADABRA in triangular form, the image becomes a magical amulet which returns to the anthropological fetish. It is a spell, an incantation or prayer conjuring a meeting place for Susan Stewart‟s “antithesis” of the tattoo versus the locket (1993, 127).
Catriona McAra
THE GREAT O (1-5)
Black and White Medium format prints
