The following images and text annotate Mary Helena Clark’s 2019 solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Art Center. The exhibition included two sound works, Cholly’s Tinnitus and Inset Speech, and a four channel video installation, A Green Shade. Works featured in the exhibition are outlined in green, all other elements are part of the artist’s research materials.
Aging Aluminum Tank Explodes, Undercurrent.org (May, 2006). This image served as a reference for modifications made to the oxygen tanks in Inset Speech, a sculptural sound work. The tanks were cut diagonally at the top, making them more resonate forms. Surface transducers were bolted to the tanks’ exteriors, allowing them to function as “speakers.”
Inset Speech (2018). Text recorded and amplified through oxygen tanks. A green list as monochrome, as blindness.
Athanasius Kircher, “The talking statue and the spiral-shaped tube (cocleato) towards the square”, Phonurgia Nova, Book I, Section VII (1673) p. 162.
Klaus-Dieter Keller, Tuning fork on carbon black, commons.wikimedia.org (17 June, 2011).
A Green Shade, video still (2018). Image combines Youtube video Canary singing in my hand with eye tracking software. The sequence and duration of looking are mapped by colors shifting from green to yellow to red.
Michael Druks, Druksland (1973). Image posted with Didier Anzieu’s The Skin Ego on the rare book seller website Bookride.com (19 March, 2007). Intersubjective, intercorporeal, skin as site for fantasy of absolute containment.
Eye Tracking in Practice, ErgoMania.eu (26 September, 2018): We look at the baby, the baby looks at the text, we do too.
Andrew Marvell, The Garden (1681), cited in Joyelle McSweeney, “What is the Necropastoral?” PoetryFoundation.org (29 April, 2014). McSweeney describes the necropastoral as the “spectacular, full of phantasmatic doubles and emanations...Synesthesia is often the method by which one substance (smell) is converted to another (sound), an infernal double produced on the form of another.” Fluidity, seepage, substitution, supersaturation.
Arthur Anker, Remarkable Leaf Texture Mimicry, Flickr.com. Leaf insect mimics its environment; a body seduced and absorbed by space. “...then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put.” Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.
Trace of saccades of the human eye on a face while scanning, Wikipedia.org (10 December, 2009).
Adaptation of one of Albrecht Dürer’s illustrations in Instructions on Measuring (1525) from the perspective of the artist. Utisz.blogspot.com (March, 2009). Fixation as a means of figuration.
Ishihara Color Deficiency Test, AOA.org. Selection of plates from the Ishihara test developed in 1918 by Japanese ophthalmologist Ishihara Shinobu to detect color blindness for the military. People with deuteranomaly and protanomaly have difficulty distinguishing between reds, greens, browns and oranges. “Green weakness” in a deuteranomalous person causes dark greens to appear black in low light.
HC300A Scouting Infrared Digital Trail Hunting Camera, AilExpress.com. Instead of attaching itself to the human eye, this trail camera is made to be strapped to a tree, and to see in the dark.
A Green Shade, video still (2018). Footage from trail camera with sinkhole animation.
