Mary Helena Clark

Mary Helena Clark’s precise image-sound arrangements conceive of cinema less as a narrative medium and more as a field for an experimental exploration of perception. In films, videos, and installations – her spectrum ranges from 16mm film to digital formats and found footage to 3D animation – she uses collage as a structural principle. As a result, her films pursue a dreamlike – associative and episodic – syntax.

Central to Clark's work is a reconfiguration of the relationship between image, sound, and the human and animal body. Her soundscapes cannot be assigned a clear beginning or end and place the viewer in an extended present. This creates a new relationship between bodies and objects, voices and surfaces. This destabilization of familiar categories also extends to Clark's sculptural work. By reinterpreting the functions of found objects, she creates hybrid forms that evoke mimicry, sentience, and affect: an oxygen tank amplifies a voice, a motorized lock seems to walk, while steel motorcycle tanks radiate a warmth approaching that of a human fever. Seemingly lifeless objects thus acquire physical properties, blurring the boundaries between animate and inanimate, technical and organic.