She was, she wasn’t

162 slides of text are projected two at a time in a dark room. The slides are programmed to dissolve in and out during an approximately 12-minute loop. The texts range from paragraphs to short phrases to single words in a meditation on creativity and procreativity, the possible conflation of female voices—mother, artist, daughter, lover—that asks questions, fractures stories, and changes color gradually, fading in and out from pink left/blue right to blue left/pink right, conveying the wide range of thought and activity, connection and disjunction that comprises the artist/mother’s life. The language in the short texts functions as a substitute for the images in a traditional slide show.

Frazer Ward writes in the essay “Foreign and Familiar Bodies” in the catalog of the exhibition Dirt and Domesticity in 1992:

She Was, She Wasn’t is unreliably reflexively autobiographical. It shifts about among fragments of first-person narrative and apparently fictional narrative; between observation, speculation and quotation. Here experience guarantees little: the conventional round of domesticity, the relation between motherhood and femininity,is itself a complex, ongoing interplay of representations, a continuous process of intermingling. In short, it’s a mess. And just as well.

View video: She was, she wasn’t

She was, she wasn’t

Your Hands Are Tied

She was, she wasn’t French version

A Room Full of Women

A group of women intermingling is filmed in a rectangular white room (a gallery without art, the women becoming the art?). The film is then projected onto a box-like screen which, placed in front of a corner, reproduces the confined space. The film is continuously looped. The spectator, watching, is drawn to the details of gestures and poses, possibly becoming caught up in them. This potential is superseded by other, distancing elements: soundtracks of women’s voices in random conversation, in a structured reading, and an authoritative male voice that directs the viewer to look at the women in three languages. He parodies an elementary language lesson, teaching the look. Fractured paintings and sculptures of women, gestures isolated, are projected over the women in the room, creating parallels with their actual comportment. The entire scene is monitored on videotape to one side and above the scene. There the images are isolated and frozen, increasing the emphasis on looking and watching, to disquieting effect.

1986-87

Woman Mystery/Femme Mystère

1984-86

Don’t Make Waves

Two sculptural elements, a nine-foot rectangular screen placed at a forty-five-degree angle to the wall, and a four-foot cube, function as multi-faceted projection surfaces. A wave breaks on a diagonal screen over the alternating profiles of a man and woman projected on the wall above. The descriptive language of waves informs us of their faltering relationship. Double entendres and altered meanings result.

Parts of Speech

Question: What had become of her?
Answer: Unavailable, undecided, undetermined.

A woman’s face, rotating 360 degrees, dominates the installation. Light as shape, as text, as movement, illuminates and alters space. Corner junctions are distorted, additional planes angle and curve walls and surfaces take on new meaning. The text enters the work visually, directs the eye, and expands the visual barriers of the room.

Alternative Museum, New York, NY

Colors and spatial relationships change. Language is presented as handwriting, as translation, as grammatical construction. Surprises await on the other side.

1979

Surprise

Opposite