THEY
THEY LUGGAGE STORE GALLERY, san Francisco February 2017
At the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco I installed —as a book-in-progress— the now very large archive of research notes, letters to Leonora Carrington, and visual studies for my adapted Hearing Trumpet. I retained the cast lists (featured in, and formally structuring my 2015 show) only as tiny thumbnail versions of themselves, and instead used mural-sized reproductions of the early draft of an epistolary essay as the vertical meter of the book exploded onto the walls. Between these essay pages I hung paper ephemera, photographs, taped or pinned as usual, shown in their original straight-out-of-the-notebook state, or scaled up or down in facsimile reproductions, and sometimes repeated or seen reframed in various places. This material plus newer images, including ugly selfies, photographs of actors cast for the imaginary Hearing Trumpet film, and video stills from the production of the Anthem videos was installed roughly chronologically, clockwise from left to right, although thematic logics also organized certain areas of a given wall. I supplied the room with a group of rolling seats, all a little tatty and eccentric - providing the viewer/reader mobile seating, but also to make a small theatre for watching ANTHEM, and ANTHEM Practice, which was rear-projected on the gallery’s long glass interior wall.
The oddball rolling chairs were themselves also a small army of crones waiting to keep a visitor company in the space.
The wall installation, entitled Tradimento-Affidamento, offered a sort of illustrated reading room, for the newly edited video work called Anthem, which I’d shown in LA in 2015. I borrow the term Affidamento from the Italian feminist Luisa Muraro, proposed as a practice of “putting faith in” or “entrusting” between women that would be the basis for a new symbolic order outside of patriarchy. Affidamento could also be understood to include a relationship of apprenticeship between women. Tradimento refers to relationship between translator and translated, betrayer and betrayed. I meant to foreground the intense ambivalence of artistic filiation - of the longing and rejection that are entwined in intimacy and independence, of the impossibility of perfect translation.