Mary Helena Clark

By testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view, Delphi Falls cycles through multiple subjectivities. The film misuses more traditional narrative conventions - the suggestion of a story, the anchoring of actors as protagonists - to have the viewer constantly questioning who or what they are, and where they are located in the film’s world.

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments.

Musical and mysterious, Mary Helena Clark’s Palms is a modular, sphinx-like film in four parts, comprised of two hands animating stillness, the repeated approach of headlights, a back-and-forth tennis match, and thoughts that emerge like objects.

Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall, and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in.

A spy film, built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots.

What are we looking at? We can perhaps discern from the greyscale fuzz, the varying degrees of white patches, fanning out from a point in shapes hard to parse, that this is an ultrasound display. But what are we trying to see in the scan? There is no baby or foetal development, no heart, no kidney, no liver, no needle to pierce through the night like a ship. But it moves in time with a voiceover. A mouth, surely? Yes. We are, quite literally, mechanically, watching someone speak.

The title piece is a two-channel video centered on the mouth – as a tool to bite and chew, as an instrument of speech, and as a site of disgust and desire. It incorporates footage of animal dentistry, bite mark analysis, and a reliquary containing the tooth of Mary Magdalene. Projected alongside is a text collaging language from psychological studies on disgust, philosophical inquiries on human nature and animality, and poetry.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?