Le Roman Du Lievre: Marginalia, an update
Marginalia is an exhibition, soon to open in Anchorage, Alaska. This group show features works from multiple international artists, and considers the individual responses to a French tale, Le Roman Du Lievre. I have two pieces in this exhibition: one video of a particular storm that occurred in June, that happened to cause great damage to my art studio while I was filming the storm from my home, and one enlarged print image of a hunter cleaning a hare by unexpected means.
In my work, I often consider the ways we gain knowledge about our selves, whether through subjective experience, or cultural influences. One of the things that I found most interesting in the Le Roman Du Lievre is the issue of threat. There are repeated moments of comfort and fear, safety and threat, all presented from the point of view of the hare. I wanted to consider how these moments perceived by the hare affected the way he understood his position. In the story, the hare takes comfort in a storm, a common literary marker of looming danger. I also found it interesting that the author repeatedly uses a quote from another book, Bluebeard, in which a woman fears her ugly husband, and finds through her curiosity that he has murdered his former wives. The quote, “Sister, do you not see anything coming?” seems almost comical in its foreshadowing, and speaks to the narrative of the unknown.
My recent work is invested in the information imparted by scientific diagrams, and our reliance on these images as facts about our selves. In my research for this project, I was drawn to books containing ‘useful’ information about hares, including anatomical drawings and especially the how-to diagrams in game hunting books. The image in One Quick Motion refers back to the significant moment in the story where the hare concedes his life for the benefits of death in Hare Heaven. For our hare, the threat of missing out on Eternal Life persuades him to give up his earthly life and accept that death will bring true happiness. This process distorted photograph shows a field hunter completing a ‘knifeless cleaning method’, a more physical technique for bodily transformation.
To learn more, go to http://leromandulievre.wordpress.com
Tags: Alaska Art, Book arts, Leah Schreiber, Milwaukee Artist