Stages of Mourning
A document from work and from life
tracing the surface I put you together to put myself together
in the grain of the pixel
for a bit of you out of time
–Sarah Pucill, Stages of Mourning
Guest programmed by Carly Whitefield
The 16mm films of artist Sarah Pucill explore the spaces around and between dualities of the subject, stillness and liveness, language and desire, and real and imaginary registers. Domestic environments become portals to multi-layered psychological realms in her works, creating a richly Surrealist visual language centred on representing the complexity and intensity of relationships between women.
An evocative journey from surface to interior, Milk and Glass probes an imbalanced equation between the erotic and the woman’s body. Inspired by writings on orality by feminist psychoanalysts Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, it approaches the mouth as a site that is at once cavernous and phallic.
Swollen Stigma nourishes a lesbian imaginary space haunted by its protagonist’s absent lover. Desire and fear interlace as the film moves through different rooms of a house and points of view shift between perspectives and between real and symbolic spaces.
Made shortly after the death of her late partner Sandra Lahire, Pucill’s Stages of Mourning unfolds as a very personal, near-ritualistic coming to terms with loss. Playing on the duality of the word ‘stage’ as both private process and public platform, the artist’s performance for the camera explores the relationship between the hallucinatory power of memory with that of the phantom ingrained in the photograph, film, or video.
Programme:
Milk and Glass, Sarah Pucill, UK, 1993, 16mm, 8 min.
Swollen Stigma, Sarah Pucill, UK, 1997, 16mm, 21 min.
Stages of Mourning, Sarah Pucill, UK, 2003, 16mm, 19 min.
@ Gladstone Hotel, Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West
Tuesday, September 19, 2017 | 8:00 PM screening | $5-10 suggested donation
Special thanks to Daniel Cockburn and LUX, London. Images courtesy of LUX, London.
EMS #100 = October TBA
Swollen Stigma
Milk and Glass