CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Mary Helena Clark (b 1983, Santee, South Carolina) manipulates traditional narrative conventions in cinema to render dissociative states and surreal environments. She connects image, sound, and objects in space to explore disembodiment, hybridity, and sensation. Clark’s exhibition at the List Center, her first solo institutional exhibition, premieres A Green Shade, a new installation comprising four channels of video and an accompanying sound work.

A Green Shade models a network of image and sound that continually returns to the idea of mechanized sense—if not in the content of the videos themselves, in the artist’s approach to producing the work. Images of the inner-workings of a bell tower loop on a monitor next to night vision footage from a motion-activated hunting camera, simultaneously both channels of video evoke the inside of the body and the absence of one. On two other corresponding monitors, looking is made visible through eye tracking heat maps and online navigation. The videos’ subjects—ceramic figurines and a parakeet, inanimate and animate collectables—are captured through screen recording. Vision implies the viewer; fixation becomes a means of figuration.

The sound piece, Cholly’s Tinnitus, uses surface transducers to amplify the architecture of the gallery. The transducers vibrate against the surface of the wall, creating a soundscape of ambient field recordings, suggesting the extension of the titular body across multiple spaces. The installation uses the logic of the apparatus to explore the personal and corporeal. The sensing body is studied, asking how feeling is rendered when sense is filtered and displaced.

Mary Helena Clark’s work has recently been exhibited at DOCUMENT, Chicago; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; JOAN, Los Angeles; KADIST, San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finland; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria; and screened at festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival. This is her first solo institutional exhibition.

List Projects: Mary Helena Clark is organized by Yuri Stone, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.