MELT, 2019
Video and sculptural installation
Fort Point Arts Gallery, Boston, MA
Collaboration with Isabel Beavers
MELT seeks to formulate a process through which illusion and icon become a simulacrum of origin and truth. In doing so, it broadens the idea of origin stories as based predominantly in the agency of male character. The work in MELT responds to Norse mythology and the phenomenological experience of the Icelandic landscape. Method and distribution both become unreliable mediators in this work that seeks to question the stability and authority of story.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction rejects the heroic trope and the symbology of a sword, in favor of exploring the bag as a container for what is sacred, generative and human. MELT similarly re-examines a canon of Western origin stories via the creation of new feminist narratives. The works co-opt known mythologies that center around ‘hero’ or ‘God’. These new myths do not end in death or victory—their dramatics are unresolved, analysis incomplete, and characters mortal. Yet the story embodies both science and mythology, adventure and ritual, raw data and human emotion.
Work also exhibited at:
HOT STEAM Screening, MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA
Icebox Projects, Philadelphia, PA