Mary Coble – Acting in Numbers
Excerpt from facebook invitation by Galleri Image
Mary Coble – Acting in Numbers
January 12, 2018 – February 25, 2018
Galleri Image, 29 Vestergade, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark
Artist talk with Mary Coble
Galleri Image
January 13, 2018 at 2pm
The opening will take place Friday January 12, 2018 from 4 pm to 6 pm. Mary Coble will be present at the opening. Opening speach by the author and visual artist, Christian Yde Frostholm.
Acting in Numbers
The works in the exhibition Acting in Numbers by Mary Coble share a focus on resistance and activism through the examination of iconic symbols, bodily gestures, chants, and signals. Coble uses both performance and photography in order to investigate and ‘queer’ our understanding of places, actions, bodies, and history.
The photo series Performing Defiance, which was commissioned by the Danish Arts Council for the series Performance photographs (2015), are moments from a durational performance involving a pink latex triangle and an abundance of glitter. Here, the artist repeated the act of raising a clenched fist in protest for an exaggerated period of time, which opened for unpredictability, messiness, and potentially failure.
Whereas photography is drawing with light, the artist has also used drawing with blood as a consistent method for over a decade. Timeline of Disruption (2016) is the photographic documentation and physical imprint of a performance by the same title, where the artist had a number of lines drawn on her body as inkless tattoos. Coble transferred the thin line of blood that formed on the skin onto a roll of paper laying on the floor by embodying the positions of defiance used in various protests.
Light is both the source and the main medium in PULSE (2016). The photo series is the result of a ten-day performance, where the artist climbed the Cinesphere of an abandoned amusement park each night to repurpose it as a beacon of protest. A series of Morse Code messages were transmitted from the structure to collaborators on the ground positioned throughout Ontario Place Park who then relayed the message on using their own light source. The morsed messages were composed of statements and chants used in recent and current protests and fights for civil rights, and they can now be transmitted again through the photographs.
The most recent photographic series, We are here (2017) and One Movement (2017), are based on traces of the marches and protests against Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, DC January 2017. Both reflect Coble’s meticulous, on foot, documentation of the fences surrounding the White House.
The exhibition is created specifically for Galleri Image and makes full use of its space to display the serial character of Coble’s photographic and performance works and to explore notions of time, repetition, and sequencing in photography and performance in general.