Archive Project 10: Anne Bray & Molly Cleator

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The Project Series
Project 10: Anne Bray & Molly Cleator

For over ten years, Los Angeles artists Anne Bray and Molly Cleator have collaborated on large-scale installations that investigate issues surrounding gender, power, community, and one's place in our mass mediated society. The artists emphasize their contrasting backgrounds and points of view-Bray, as a public and installation artist, and Cleator, as a visual and performance artist-to examine and explore the often contradictory relations between the powerful and the powerless. Bray and Cleator use multimedia installations to reclaim and recombine stereotypes and archetypes through image and sound. For this exhibition, they expanded upon several previous pieces that used female figures juxtaposed with both personal and media-derived imagery to examine still unresolved conflicts about women, culture, and history.

In Pressure Drop, the artists literally placed the viewer underneath the room-sized skirt of a woman. Video imagery continually projects on the woman's body, her skirt, and on the wall behind her. Catalogue essayist Holly Willis points out that the artists invite us "to step into a space that is both comforting and totally taboo; it is at once much ado about nothing and the source of everything." As the inflated lower torso and legs of the woman's body expands and deflates-powered by a timed series of noisy fans-she struggles to stand up and resist the overwhelming force of the dominant culture's images projected on her and then falls to her knees exhausted. At the same time, her awesome scale, the beautiful materials of her skirt, and her powerful voice protest her victimhood.

For Bray and Cleator, video projection physically and conceptually addresses many of the issues they are concerned with. Most obviously, perhaps, is the reference to ideas of psychological "projection." Per Freudian and Jungian philosophies, one could say that all art is the artist's "projection" of deep-seated fears, taboos, desires, etc.; that the audience then "projects" their own issues and beliefs onto. On another level, in Pressure Drop, Bray and Cleator have chosen a three-dimensional, empathetic screen for their projections, in contrast to the traditional Hollywood movie's flat screen. The changing shape of the projected image-a time-based medium-and the body imply that there is no singular reality, no one decisive moment. Bray and Cleator also think of this installation-this "woman"-as a round peg trying to fit into a square hole, noting that women may fit into the "square" hole, but there are gaps between the perceived realities.

The video images stem from an extensive research trip Bray and Cleator took last summer to investigate their family histories. Bray videotaped the images of the whitewasher and the weedwacker on the same day in Ireland. The whitewasher scrubs as he paints the white body of the woman; the artists ask, "isn't this redundant? Isn't she pure enough?" The artists also address "whiteness" with such ideas as the contemporary art gallery as a "white cube," the dominant "white race," the psychological implications of a blank "white screen," and an empty "white canvas" only completed by an artist's marks.

The artists placed the video imagery of the green weedwacker on the wall behind the woman, forcing the audience to look through her skirt to see him. The weedwacker continually cuts down Queen Anne's lace and wild roses with his gas-powered machine. His containment and destruction of nature reflects the unease with which our patriarchal culture views nature and femaleness. Ideas of "nature," like the "feminine," have often been viewed by our society as uncontrollable and threatening; in opposition to the superiority of the intellect, expressed through "culture" and here signified by the weedwacker. In this discourse, woman is seen as land to be contained and as property to be annilihated. Bray and Cleator critique this masculinist ideology and represent these issues in a way that affirms their celebratory values and feminist priorities.

The exhibition of work by Anne Bray and Molly Cleator was the tenth in Montgomery Gallery's Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts. During each exhibition, participating artists work with faculty and students in relevant disciplines.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator