Blind Spot

Installation with 4 audio tapes.
Eye Level Gallery, Halifax, NS, 1987

Blind Spot begins on the back porch of a suburban home. The wooden deck gives way to an expanse of sodden lawn and garden plots. In the far corner is a wooden compost box from which the sounds of a hostile dialogue emanate. The sound is distorted and rotting but still audible. Inside the house, the walls are thin translucent paper stained with bruises and sutures. The architecture has been given the job of receiving and making visible the physical violence that the woman’s body normally receives in a violent home. The living room bedrooms and kitchen contain soundtracks embedded in the walls of fragments of women’s monologues, dialogues, and drumming tracks. “The audio tracks are central as they are declarations of a woman who vows to no longer keep this a secret. They are transformative processes representing the emergence of the survivor from the role of victim operating through the metaphors of a voice from silence, testimony from secretiveness, visibility from the Blind Spot, and presence from absence itself.”* It is the house that speaks and the door has been taken off of its hinges and opens the possibility of escape.
*Barbara Lounder

(This section is in Progress)

Eye Level Gallery – Melodie Calvert

Audio Engineer – Allan Scarth