What is Perverse is Liquid (NS 0000)

2023

3-channel HD video installation, color, 5.1 audio, 35:54 min

What is Perverse is Liquid, the fourth work in Negative Space series, was shot locally at various locations near the artist’s home in Upstate New York. The video explores metaphors, qualities, and properties of water such as transmission, transformation, liquid assets, leaks, and water’s essential role in the cycle of life and death.

Created in part as a feminist critique of artist Marcel Duchamp’s voyeuristic installation Étant donnés (1946–66), What is Perverse is Liquid is structured as a series of interfaces including peepholes, portholes, computer screens, and other visual “leaks.” The video crescendos as a pregnant performer lies prone, referencing the nude featured in Duchamp’s work. Instead the performer rejects the viewer’s gaze by reflecting the sun back into their eyes.

In an abandoned IBM office building, a skeleton representing “planned obsolescence” haunts the halls while three teenagers simulate office work using now defunct technologies. Inside this post-productive wasteland the teens meticulously labor, smelting pennies and stripping the building to extract copper—a material known for its conductive qualities and being more valuable than the penny itself.

Outdoors in a swamp, two performers engage in a call and response with the sounds of their surroundings, slowly evolving their chirps into the words “unsoothable thirst is another kind of haunting,” quoted from poet Natalie Diaz. Meanwhile, a musician discovers a piano in a defunct limestone mine. The dripping interior resonates in cacophonous echo’s and concludes in a ballad sung to “water”—a torrid lover—that polarizes in absence and excess.

In What is Perverse is Liquid, two larger screen meet in a corner of the room while a third smaller projection wall is situated at the center and cycles an atmospheric film of swamp life. A black pool liner covers the floor, and a half circle of plexi in from of the swamp projection creates the illusion of a reflective pool. On the other side of the projection wall, , a semi-circle of sandbags-turned-seating creates a “dry” pool of sand and pennies.