Monday, September 13, 2010

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Just Because 10.4 ~ Accidental Pornographies: Lesson Plans 1-9

Mary Walling Blackburn


Sunday, September 19, 6-8pm
September 19 - October 31, 2010

Accidental Pornographies: Lesson Plans 1-9 presents nine drawings by the artist that take this course as their jumping off point. Originally composed as lesson plans for a substitute-taught workshop at the Blanton Museum of Art, these drawings re-present the course material on oversized ledger paper, as if ripped from the pages of a massive record book. Text, images and erasures (in the form of blacked out portions of the page) appear in delicate etching, smudged charcoal and dripping black paint. The drawings, like the course itself, embody the complicated territory of the vagina as subject in a post-feminist, yet enduringly gendered, world. They present the vagina somewhere between language and the body, as both theoretical and corporeal entity. Here, it is assertive, even bawdy, yet tender, despondent yet eruptive, familiar yet utterly unfamiliar.
Accompanying the drawings will be a video installation, Black Divine Light. The installation includes a stack of small hand-held black mirrors situated beside a small boulder upon which the viewer is seated. In this brief video, a hand-held camera makes record of a black mirror that is alternately reflecting a violent summer storm and the opening between a woman's legs. The mirror is a contemporary riff on the Claude Glass, an 18th century European framing device intended to concentrate one's gaze on the landscape.
Mary Walling Blackburn is an artist and the founder of the experimental school for women, The Anhoek School. Walling Blackburn's writing has been published inAfterall, Aperture, Art in America, ArtForum, Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet Magazine, CTHEORY, lastperformance.org, loudpaper (architectural discourse), Paper Monument and Women and Performance. She is a visiting artist at the Cooper Union School of Art this fall.

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