Video file
CATHERINE CARSON
MARTENS EVANS
ABSTRACT
Folks, the Truth is hard to know—if can be known at all.1 Conventional Western wisdom tells us: stick to the facts. (I’m looking at you, Enlightenment.) We privilege the written word as an objective and reliable vehicle for communication. Useful, yes, but we over-rely. I counter with this: bodily performativity and purposeful inaccuracy that produces, paradoxically, narrative accuracy. These methods roil in our gut or tug at our heartstrings—instead of recoiling, we should embrace them.
I like to unpack “the stories we tell ourselves,”2 our personal and societal mythologies, with a particular eye to how the past plays a role in these constructions. Telling things slant3—diving into the uncanny—disrupts our visual complacency with both delight and disorientation. By employing temporal and spatial anachronisms in a performative motion-based practice, I aim not to obscure truth, but to promote inquiry.
Indulgences
Three-channel video installation
03:00
2018
Souls were at stake. When an angry Martin Luther affixed his Ninety-Five Theses in public view in 1517, precipitating the Protestant Reformation, he had many complaints against the Catholic Church. (Ninety-five, to be exact.) Chief among these was the selling of indulgences. This was a transactional practice—give the Church money, get time off of purgatory. Indulgences had a long history (and, technically, still exist today), but by the Renaissance things had gotten out of hand. As Luther was quick to point out, indulgences had become less about congregants’ salvation and more about augmenting the very worldly resources of the Church. The Holy Father in Rome, infallible? More like corrupt as hell. So Martin led a little schism.
Last year was the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Theses. I happened to read an article about them and ended up with indulgences on the brain. The word brought to mind lowfat yogurt and Dove chocolate commercials, with their portrayal of female temptation and “acceptable” satisfaction—women and their just desserts. After some percolation, I made this project.
Here we see three iconic women of the church—Eve, Mary Magdalene, and Mary (the Immaculate one). Eve bites into an apple—forbidden fruit. Mary M. eats and pits a cherry—she’s a little tart. Mother Mary appears to breastfeed, but instead reveals her breast to be a grapefruit half that she proceeds to juice—for the fruit of the womb? I shot their gestures with the Edgertronic high speed camera. Every movement becomes stretched, excruciatingly suspended. Placing food into the mouth is sensuous—chewing is not, especially in slow motion. Each woman appears in triptych, performing her gesture, lit with red and blue colored gels. Is it the same woman three times or three similar women? (The classic trinitarian conundrum!) The better question is: when will female bodily acceptance not be seen or felt as self-indulgent?
Dear Emily
Video
01:32
2016
Hands emerge uncannily from behind elements of the bright plastic set, bearing lines of an Emily Dickinson poem. The surreal grace of the hands belie the difficult choreographic precision required to produce this video as a solo effort. (Like Emily, I labored alone in a garret for this production.) Earlier, more earnest attempts to build the set resulted in failure—a goofy pastiche of the antique and the natural. Dickinson’s style may be antiquated, but her words and sentiments continue to evoke and arrest. I wanted to capture the spirit of her poem without fossilizing it. By building a stage exclusively from garish plastic representations of nature and setting the poem in blasé snippets of Helvetica, the video became a juxtaposition of the contemporary and the historical, the natural and the artificial. Daniel Lanois’ electronically-skewed guitar music—Two Worlds from his album Belladonna—drifts in the background, intertwining with the sound of crickets. I wished to give voice to the poem’s playful sweetness and simultaneous deep melancholy. Over 100 years later, our relationship to nature remains fraught, arguably even more so. (My own tender judgment.)
Carry My Heart
Video loop
00:32
2018
Beryl is a mineral made of beryllium aluminum cyclosilicate, Be3Al2(SiO3)6 for short. You might also know it as emerald or aquamarine. It’s also my maternal great grandmother’s name. Both make an appearance in this video loop. You might even call it an ode to Beryl. The most present yet elusive character in the family archive I collected, she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 1938. Losing her mother was a traumatic experience for my grandmother who was eight at the time. Despite my grandmother’s reticence when it came to her family and
childhood, we’ve suddenly come to know Beryl through the plethora of items she left behind.
I choreographed a simple sequence to the chorus of a sappy song—Carry My Heart. (That’s the extent of the lyrics.) The genre is Americana—it’s languid with a twang, and my motions match that tone. However, Fragments of face and rock animate over my motions, a full-body mask. The nested screen that hides my body expands at the end of the loop, filling the screen as I run backwards to begin the sequence again.
Endnotes
ENDNOTES
- Riffing on the New York Times’ The Truth is Hard campaign.
- Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.
- A nod to Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
