Delphi Falls

Mary Helena Clark | 2016 | USA | 19’ | Digital | English spoken

Testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view, Delphi Falls cycles through multiple subjectivities, misusing traditional narrative conventions – the suggestion of a story, the anchoring of actors as characters – inviting the viewer to constantly question who or what they are.

Palms

Mary Helena Clark | 2017 | USA |8’ | Digital | sound 

Palms, a film constructed in four parts, each moving further away from a human subjectivity. Alluding to a state of disembodiment, the film’s images arrive like thoughts. In this way, Palms skirts an expected relationship with its subjects, encountering them as both agents of and extractions from the real world. Here our vision is monocular, collapsing figure and ground.

The Glass Note

Mary Helena Clark | 2018 | USA | 9’ | Digital | English text

“The Glass Note re-contextualizes seemingly unconnected elements — fragmented bodies, statuary, a beach marred by a storm, a virtual ocean, the phenomena of lithophonic stones, empty bear cages at an abandoned zoo, a chair that served as a hearing aid — to understand the body’s permeability and to extend the sensorial beyond the corporeal. Playing with notions of ‘thrown voice’ and the untrustworthy image, sound and image commingle, animate, and touch each other, exploring cinema’s inherent ventriloquism.” (Mary Helena Clark)

Figure Minus Fact

Mary Helena Clark | 2020 | USA | 13’ | Digital | sound 

“Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subject-less portrait of loss.” (Mary Helena Clark) 

Exhibition

Mary Helena Clark | 2022 | USA | 19’ | Digital | English spoken  

“Exhibition moves through gallery rooms and archives, compounding multiple biographies into a single imaginary subject. A woman marries the Berlin Wall, stabs a Velázquez painting as an act of protest and longing, declares herself a doorknob, and plumbs the erotics of the Klein bottle. Using citation, appropriation, and museological forms of display, the film is a mediation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood.” (Mary Helena Clark)

In the presence of Mary Helena Clark and followed by a conversation between Clark and Hannah Bonner.