{"id":6019,"date":"2015-04-22T09:23:47","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T09:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.saic.edu\/cate\/?p=6019"},"modified":"2025-05-12T19:47:22","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T01:47:22","slug":"on-projections-portraits-and-picaresques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/2015\/04\/22\/on-projections-portraits-and-picaresques\/","title":{"rendered":"On “Projections, Portraits, and Picaresques”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Projections, Portraits, and Picaresques: Works by Mary Helena Clark, Mariah Garnett, and Latham<\/em> Zearfoss <\/em><\/a>screens the at Gene Siskel Film Center tomorrow, Thursday, April 23rd at 6pm.\u00a0<\/strong>Mary Helena Clark, Mariah Garnett, and Latham Zearfoss in person!<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Mariah Garnett, Still from Encounters I May or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin , 2012. Courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ouroboros\u2014an ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. Rather than requiring or demanding a space, this reworking of a culture opens up its own space in the form of a temporal or social rupture. This serpent is all knowing\u2014a never-ending circuit from mouth to anus. It is the constant consumption and regurgitation of the detritus of society. And although there may be no originality in the form, it is through the process of digestion that one may reshape it into an alternate form. Rather than viewing identity construction as something forged through denial and loss, this feedback loop short-circuits the concept of transmission. This temporal feedback is critical to make sense of contemporary identity formation and culture through reinvention, renegotiation and reimagining\u2014a problem discussed by Cindy Patton and Benigno S\u00e1nchez-Eppler in their opening text of Queer Diasporas, <\/em>the stated focus of which is \u201con how to make sense of the always poignant and sometimes hilarious labors of reinvention and renegotiation in new places, or in reimagined old ones.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Projections, Portraits, and Picaresques <\/em>plays with the concepts portrait and autobiography in our cultural moment of hyper self-reflexivity. In Mariah Garnett\u2019s Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin<\/em> (2012) the filmmaker deals with monumentality and narcissism through the interrogation of her own body. In the opening frames of the film Garnett dons Peter Berlin drag\u2014a white leather motorcycle jacket and sock-stuffed jockstrap\u2014in order to both reveal and simultaneously obscure her relationship to the 1970s porn star. As Sven L\u00fcttiken writes in his essay A Movie and Other Pictures, <\/em>\u201cThe process of mediation has now come to be seen as an integral element of performative practices. Oral and written accounts, film, and video are no longer seen as derivatives of the \u2018real\u2019 artwork, but as providing access to it even while (re)shaping it.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Mary Helena Clark through her bringing together of appropriated and staged footage also touches on moments of reflexive clarity and understanding. In The Dragon is the Frame <\/em>(2014) Clark meditates on a world shaped by missing persons by linking landmarks from Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Vertigo <\/em>(1958) with the persistent online presence of Mark Aguhar. This detective story reinvents, renegotiates, and reimagines\u2014attempting to negotiate an identity through the process of exploration and loss.<\/p>\n

Tempus edax rerum<\/em> or time, gluttonous of things. Time\u2014be that social, suspended, or life\u2014is the devourer of all things in Latham Zearfoss\u2019 Home Movie <\/em>(2012) where the artist questions our society\u2019s innate need to capture, mediate and disseminate every waking moment of our lives through social media platforms. The arrival of this slippery networked image marks the end of object truth and a canonized collective memory. Visual culture, in particular the moving image, has returned to the medieval notion of metaphorical truths.[3]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n

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Mary Helena Clark, still from The Dragon is the Frame, 2014. Courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[1]<\/a> S\u00e1nchez-Eppler, B. & Patton, C. \u201cIntroduction: With a Passport Out of Eden\u201d in Queer Diasporas, ed. Cindy Patton and Benigno S\u00e1nchez-Eppler, 1-14. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> L\u00fctticken, S. A Movie and Other Pictures, Louise Lawler: A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture (Amsterdam: If I Can\u2019t Dance) 15<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Wyatt, R. The Emergence of a Digital Cinema, Computers and the Humanities Vol. 33, 1999, p.377<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Projections, Portraits, and Picaresques: Works by Mary Helena Clark, Mariah Garnett, and Latham Zearfoss screens the at Gene Siskel Film Center tomorrow, Thursday, April 23rd at 6pm.\u00a0Mary Helena Clark, Mariah Garnett, and Latham Zearfoss in person!\u00a0 Ouroboros\u2014an ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. Rather than requiring or demanding a space, this reworking […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from On “Projections, Portraits, and Picaresques”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":6027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[115,872,211,237,250,353,390,397,481,516,615],"class_list":["post-6019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20","tag-chicago","tag-essays","tag-experimental","tag-george-william-price","tag-group-programs","tag-latham-zearfoss","tag-mariah-garnett","tag-mary-helena-clark","tag-portrait","tag-saic-alumni","tag-usa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6019"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10191,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6019\/revisions\/10191"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}