Mary Helena Clark

Bridget Donahue proudly presents Conveyor, a solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Mary Helena Clark. The exhibition contains a two-channel video, a series of six photographs, and several motorized and amplified sculptures.

The video Neighboring Animals is organized around 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 these images is a text collaging language from psychological studies on disgust, Georges Bataille, and Emily Dickinson.

One trigger for disgust is a rupture of the inside and the outside, what has been termed envelope violation. For instance a bone puncturing the skin. Throughout the exhibition we see objects which subtly dramatize a confusion around such thresholds. Brooders is a series of photographs of styrofoam and cardboard incubators: temperature controlled environments for hatching eggs. These unassuming containers appear like human made habitats – rooms, closets, cells – while functioning as something like makeshift wombs.

At the center of the gallery are a pair of steel doors that have been cut apart, emptied, and welded together with a gap between. The interior of each door is amplified with transducers playing audio of spectators at a zoo, turning the metal faces of the doors into simple speakers. Here Clark pairs sound and object in much the same way she does as a filmmaker, by attaching sound to image in order to create another more curious object – a bell that rings with the sound of a swing set, or a racking exposure synced to human breath – what Clark has described as “cinema’s inherent ventriloquism.”

Throughout the gallery are several dead bolts motorized to continuously lock and unlock. They appear animate, crawling their way across the gallery floor, as machines mirroring back human feeling – sympathy, comedy, disgust.

Mary Helena Clark (b. 1983, USA) lives and works in Queens, New York. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally, including presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Sundance Film Festival, Park City; Swedish Film Institute, Stockholm; The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Yerba Buena Center; San Francisco; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and at the New York, London, Rotterdam and Toronto International Film Festivals.