Mary Helena Clark
Delphi Falls
2017
Mary Helena Clark, Delphi Falls, 2017. Film still.
By testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view, Delphi Falls cycles through multiple subjectivities. The film misuses more traditional narrative conventions -the suggestion of a story, the anchoring of actors as characters- to have the viewer constantly questioning who or what they are, and where they are located in the film’s world.
Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work uses the language of collage, often bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code, to explore dissociative states through cinema. 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. Working with quotation, the materiality of film, and incongruous sound/image relationships, Clark’s recent work explores shifting subjectivities and the limits of the embodied camera. Her films encompass a wide range of techniques including collage, performance, and direct observations of the natural world. Their subtle nature invites viewers to collaborate in seeking out meaning from mysteries that have been forged from a diversity of elements.