SCREEN: Mary Helena Clark

Throughout the month, MOCA’s online platform for experimental film and video art will highlight the work of Mary Helena Clark. Clark works across film, video, and installation to create montage-driven films that expand the connotative possibilities of sound and image. Her media-based works suggest a fragmentary viewing experience that upends traditional conventions in cinema. Over the course of the month, moca.org/screen will present two films: The Glass Note (2018) and Figure Minus Fact (2020). In The Glass Note (2018), disparate sound, image, and text elements are collaged together to produce a subtly shifting and hyper-sensory viewing experience. Sonic and haptic sensations come together in an exploration of heterogeneity, embodiment, and displacement. Figure Minus Fact (2020) is a subjectless portrait of loss. The film draws attention to the threshold between spaces, objects, and sensory domains, alluding to spectral zones that exist beyond the frame.

The Glass Note
2018, 9 min, HD Video
In The Glass Note, a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image.

Figure Minus Fact
2020, 13 min, HD Video
Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subjectless portrait of loss.

Watch all films on moca.org/screen.

About the Artist:
Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her montage-driven work explores the potentials and limits of intelligibility, agency, and affect. Her films have screened at festivals and venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; New York Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Cinéma du réel, Paris; Viennale, Vienna; ICA London; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York. Exhibitions include MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; MOCA Detroit; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Connecticut; and DOCUMENT, Chicago. She has curated screenings and events at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Bridget Donahue, New York; school, Vienna; JOAN, Los Angeles; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

SCREEN: Mary Helena Clark is organized by Troyese Robinson.

Virtual MOCA is presented by the MOCA Thrive Fund courtesy of Chara Schreyer.