Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 3

Born 1983 in Santee, SC
Lives in Hamilton, NY

Mary Helena Clark’s films explore invented spaces and hyperreal landscapes. She manipulates visual and sonic fields to mysterious effect, with fractured slices of sound and image serving as clues to narratives that are just out of reach.   

Clark’s The Dragon is the Frame (2014) is a half-remembered reconstruction of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Images of San Francisco’s architectural and urban markershints at Hitchcock’s original film locationsare fused with video footage by the late artist Mark Aguhar (1987–2012). The film is a confounding search for an intangible figure and an elusive glimpse into the intersections of histories both personal and cinematic. Clark’s most recent work, Delphi Falls (2017), complicates filmic conventions by testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view. The work destabilizes viewers’ relationships to both subject and narrative as Clark continuously shifts through multiple perspectives, visual languages, and landscapes.