Conjuring Specters

Media artist Zoe Beloff mines the territory of the uncanny, invoking both the wonder and angst of the familiar as it suddenly becomes strange. In terms of tools, she prefers the old to the new, cranking up old cameras and revisiting forgotten technologies, and for stories, she channels the ghostly ephemera of Spiritualism from the 1800s. For her show this Monday at REDCAT, the artist will present two stereoscopic films, both of which unite the haunting magic of cinema and tales of psychic uncertainty. Charming Augustine concerns a 15-year-old patient of Charcot, who was prone to hallucinations. Named Augustine, the girl was sent to France's famous Salpetriere Hospital in the 1880s, where she was watched, analyzed and photographed. The resulting images capture physical manifestations of hysteria, and they're at once haunting and intriguing; what inner turmoil could cause such anguish? Beloff explains that she hopes "to show how patients like Augustine supplied the psychic drive that would come to flower in the works of D.W. Griffith." Augustine's unpredictable behavior and the film's silent cinema imagery make it fascinating, but Beloff enhances the sense that the film is from another era altogether by using 3-D. "Ultimately," she says, "what I wish to convey is a fragile, spectral, what if... a moment in time when the moving image was on the brink of existence in a form not yet standardized." The show will also include Shadowland Or Light From The Other Side and Beloff will be present to talk about her work after the show.
Zoe Beloff: Conjuring Specters
Monday, April 27, 8:30 p.m.
Redcat Theater