Behind the Slides, our ongoing feature, is where we meet up with an artist who presented at a PechaKucha event and find out the deeper story beneath the images they chose to portray.

Ariel Hall is a multi-disciplinary artist working mainly in performance and installation. She is currently working on projects for the opening of the new Center for Maine Contemporary Art, co-curating TEDxDirigo events and keeping furiously busy in her studio.

Note: The slides appear in the right column. Click on the photos to match them with the actual slide notes (in italics). Beneath the slide notes will be the deeper story.

Moebius Strip

This is a moebius strip—a long and somewhat tangled one that I made of paper. If you imagine walking along the strip, you would return to your starting point having traversed the entire length on both "sides" but without ever crossing an edge. You're on the outside, then suddenly you're on the inside, but then the inside becomes the outside again, but actually the outside IS the inside. This torsion of inside and outside is much like a body's reflexive surfaces, where the boundaries between interiority and exteriority, oneself and the world, are in constant reciprocity with one another.

Moebius strips are a guiding motif in my work. My work has always been predicated on the body, exploring the relationship between subject and object, and moebius strips are the perfect physical manifestation of this relationship—form, analogy, and metaphor, entwined.

Planes of Contact

I'm interested in planes of contact—permeable membranes, like skin, that simultaneously contain and demarcate, and allow for connection and flow. Bodies are our means and our medium in the world, and the very substance of us as subjects. So we are both object and subject, enfolded.

I've done a number of collaborations with local photographer Ralph Hassenpflug. We work easily, fluidly together, drawn to similar materials and processes. This photo came from a long series of portraits we made using materials of various transparencies to wrap or occlude or layer over me. This is a lot about exploring emotional states of selfhood.

Corporeality

For me, corporeality is the most accessible framework for understanding the complexities of being a subject. This view of subjectivity assumes that bodily knowing is knowing—that a body has its own functional intelligence not lesser than the mind's. It's almost like I'm making maps of myself for myself, using my body as the primary thinking tool to better understand what it means to be a subject among subjects.

I love working with latex. As a material, it is endlessly interesting to me. I love that it becomes like a second skin that I can stretch, pull, tear, fold, layer over me. It does wonderful things with light, and it's so resilient.

Containers

I'm particularly drawn to making and using various containers—jars and sacks and womb-like things that contain just like a body contains. In some ways, bodies are just vibrant containers for visceral mass—assemblages of many multiple containers brought together, smushed together, and held more or less in place by our skin. I'm compelled by materials and forms that reference a body or evoke bodiless.

These containers are very visceral to me. I made them by melting down plastic bottles into wilted forms. They are like little bodies, little clear bodies that reveal their fluid insides. But they're also just simple vases.

Anthropophagic Slobber

Part of what I loved about performing this piece, called Anthropophagic Slobber, by Lygia Clark, was that it so explicitly plays with the relationships between interior, exterior, and surface. By drawing thread out of one's mouth onto the skin of another, what's internal is literally made external, and a second skin of accumulated thread forms.

For the past two years I have performed other artists' work at the Museum of Modern Art. This is one of those pieces. I actually wrote about this particular piece in my graduate thesis. I've been working with this same group of performers on a number of different shows, and we have developed this incredible intimacy which makes doing a piece like this one much easier than if it were with strangers.

Yoko Ono’s Bag

Sometimes a simple device, like Yoko Ono's black cloth bag for Bag Piece, is the most profoundly effective. Getting inside the bag and spending hours in it, every day, for four months, changes you. From inside, a whole world is available to you. You can see out to the people looking at you, but they can't see in beyond the bag's opacity.

This is another piece I did at MoMA. I loved the freedom that it allowed—you're simultaneously very much on display and totally hidden from view. It allows you to really be yourself, which was partly Yoko's intention with the piece. This photo is taken from inside the bag, looking out to my reflection in a mirror across the way. I love the reflexive thing that happens here where you can see yourself looking at yourself but you can't actually see yourself—all you see is your form. Again, I think of that flip between inside and outside, self and other.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com