Infection in the Sentence

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria - Emily Dickinson

This project includes an installation, several super-8 hand-developed films, an artist book and paintings. The 'infected sentence' is a term picked up from an Emily Dickinson poem and used by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their 1979 work of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. Gilbert and Gubar use the term to describe a situation where language comes to us marked with an ideology which defines and encloses women.

The Yellow Wallpaper - installation

This was a site-specific installation made in 1990 at the Alice Hotel. It was based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. I also referenced The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, her autobiography published in 1935. I began reading this autobiography when I was in the middle of my installation at the Alice Hotel, 14th and Alice Street, Oakland, California. It was interesting to read the following passage by:
"On February 6th we moved (Dora, Katharine and I) to 1258 Webster Street, taking three furnished rooms... On the eighth: 'I take Katharine to her first school, Miss Wyman, on Alice Street a lovely girl, the teacher, just a pleasant little home school, Kate likes it.'" (pg. 137)

North Wind - film

This super-8 film transfered to video is based on the opening lines in the Susan Glaspell Keeting's short story, A Jury of Her Peers:
"When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eyes made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away - it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County." (pg.3)

Saint - artist book & film

Both the book and film are inspired by Jean Rhys' 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a deconstruction of Charlotte Bronte's 1846 novel, Jane Eyre. Rhys' novel is written in three parts, each told in a different voice. First in the voice of young Antoinette living in the West Indies. Next, the voice of Mr. Rochester who marries Antoinette, changes her name to Bertha and takes her to England. The last part of the novel is told in the voice of Bertha, the "madwoman in the attic" who, as in Jane Eyre, burns Rochester's house down.

Tulips - film

This black and white super-8 film was shot in 1989 at the Luxembourgh Gardents in Paris and tulip gardens outside of Amsterdam. I eventually transferred it to video and re-edited it into a short two-channel video. The title is a loose reference to Sylvia Plath's 1961 poem, Tulips.

Other texts refered to in the paintings

The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (Novas Cartas Portuguesas) by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho Da Costa.
See a Time.com article regarding the controversy in 1973: "The Case of The Three Marias"
Letters of a Portuguese Nun (used as a unifying theme for The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters) possibly written by a young sixteenth-century Portuguese nun named Mariana Alcoforado. Henri Matisse drew from these "Lettres portugaises."
The Bluest Eye, a novel by Toni Morrison (The painting, Hundred Year Sleep references the minor character Rosemary Vilanucci)
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics The following quote is used (with intentional misspellings) in the painting, The Emperor's Fly. " We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its system of socialization, so complete the general assent to its values, so long and so universally has it pre veiled in human society, that it scarcely seams to require violent implementation. Customarily, we view its brutalities in the past as exotic or primitive custom. Those of the present are re guarded as the product of individual deviance, confined to pathological or exceptional behavior, and without general import. And yet, just as under other total ideologies racism and colonialism are somewhat analogous in this respect. control in patriarchal society would be imperfect even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon. both in emergencies and as an ever present instrument of intimidation." This painting also references the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings.