A Reeducation evokes a turn-of-the-century reading room. A bookshelf (holding books about utopia, feminism, and economics), antique rugs, photographs, a painting, and natural objects comprise the environment. A small table displays a book I’ve written and hand-bound. The book is titled A Cure for the Marriage Spirit and incorporates a bit of time travel. The main character, through her research into nineteenth-century feminists and her experimentation with polyamory, resists a linear concept of time as she imagines communing with the dead—comrades who enable her to dream up alternative social conditions in her own time, to rethink marriage, questions of equality and sexual politics, and to challenge what is considered normal. It is my hope that the text’s non-linear temporal construction enables viewer-subjects to similarly engage in formulating future possibilities. The book text is linked HERE.
Surrounding the walls are photographs, one of a book that lays open to a poem by Henry David Thoreau about free love, and two others that reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a utopian feminist novel from 1915 in which three male explorers discover an all-female civilization—a frame within which to contrast gender discrimination with social alternatives. My photographs present evidence of that civilization, of the former persisting in the present. Moving beyond this example of early twentieth-century binary politics, I’m interested instead in productive dissent among non-fixed subject identities—a model to replace that of the center/periphery.
In the installation Utopians Dance, wood flooring, music, and video create a space of levity that encourages dance under a series of strung lights. The video monitor displays, for example, dancing feet with subtitles that convey messages combining fringe, caring-based economies with contra-dancing calls. In both models cooperation is embraced, and competition, and therefore power relations, are discouraged. The atmosphere of Utopians Dance evokes the desire for joy and freedom, and asks whether we’ll join the dance. The video plays below.
Propped up on the dance floor is an album cover titled In My Utopia. It represents a future not yet realized. I haven’t written or recorded the songs yet. No vinyl has been produced. The album sleeve is empty. The song titles correspond to my interest in feminism and utopia and the liner notes are taken from my book A Cure for the Marriage Spirit. Images of the album cover are below.
Viewers enter the open dance floor space and find that they occupy a dual position, one of observing while being observed. Who am I? Who is she? I’m considering this dual position of subjectivity and how it relates to larger notions of belonging and community.
P o r t f o l i o I’ve selected a group of installations for your review below. Multiple views of a project are joined by a grey or black frame. Documentation of some installations include external links to audio and video components. I’ve also included links to writing and relevant sites.
For works in other media see: andrearay.net
ReCast LIVE ON-AIR Details of speaker sculptures outside the main elliptical curtain playing environmental audio tracks, one of the 1970 and 2017 Women’s Marches, the other plays sounds of a bucolic landscape with a croquet game and a hymn being hummed.
Lights, rugs, seating, sound absorbing curtains, speaker cloth, cardboard, paint, 54-minute 6-channel audio, and audio equipment. Dimensions variable. 2018. IAC White Gallery, Malmö
ReCast LIVE ON-AIR Lights, rugs, seating, sound absorbing curtains, copper pipe, speaker cloth, cardboard, paint, 54-minute 6-channel audio, audio equipment. Dimensions variable. 2018. IAC White Gallery, Malmö
ReCast LIVE ON-AIR takes the shape of a live studio discussion in which people from across 200 years have come together to share their intimate experiences and perspectives on gender and non-monogamy. This group of specters and futuristics hash out the separation of love from pleasure, and debate the liberatory possibilities of various forms of caring such as free love, polyamory, complex marriage, and a future form I call “expanded affinities”. One radio guest is a nineteenth century free love commune member who appears in the studio to share the continued relevance of their community’s free love practices; another is a twentieth century essentialist feminist who is unable to let go of the gender binary; others speak from a future where neither gendered subjectivities nor singular forms of relationships exist. The voices are inspired by people like queer theorist Paul Preciado, French novelist Anaïs Nin, and Tirzah Miller who was a member of the nineteenth century non-monogamous group, the Oneida Community.
The audio is installed in such a way that the voice of each ‘radio guest’ plays back through an individual speaker within the main elliptical curtain. Two speakers outside the curtained area play the callers or specters of the station as well as environmental tracks—one of chants from the Women’s March of 1970, the other a bucolic walk through the grasses while humming a hymn. Spectators are able to commune with the disembodied voices in a listening space that evokes both a nineteenth century séance parlor and a futuristic radio station. The voices confer in an ever-present loop on WPPF Radio, and thus creates a type of utopian futurity.
ReCast LIVE ON AIR is produced from a sense of longing to be free from the here and now. The specters from the past and future are summoned to confer and to release us from the immediate constraints of society, law, and culture in order to make way for a utopian future. Sounding like voices from an outer ring of space, the relationship radicals reject the charmed circle and the linearity of the relationship escalator that ascends from dating, to love, to marriage, and then children. The installation works to resist forms of “straight time”.
ReCast LIVE ON-AIR Installation with Sound
ReCast LIVE ON-AIR was discussed in my presentation under the same name for the Hauntopia / What if? conference at the Artistic Research Pavilion in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice September 7-9, 2017. CONFERENCE PROGRAM HERE.
Additionally, the project was developed from my research, much of which is located in my DOCTORAL DISSERTATION LINKED HERE.
Utopians Dance Lights, flooring, video and audio equipment, album cover. Dimensions variable. 2013. Utopians Dance transforms the space into a dance hall and evokes a relationship between caring economics and contra dancing calls.
In My Utopia Back cover. Color photo on album cover, back side. 12” square. 2013. This is the back cover of my album sitting on the floor of Utopians Dance. The vinyl is absent, representing a future not yet realized. The object, with its titles and writing, provides space for the viewer's projections.
Utopians Dance Installation with video and sound
Utopians Dance Video still
Utopians Dance The proposal of a caring economy replacing capitalism is emphasized in turning a garage into a dance hall and collaborative dance calls.
Utopians Dance was discussed in an interview by Matthew Buckingham for BOMB MAGAZINE FOUND HERE.
A Reeducation Installation with reading material. Open Source Gallery
A Reeducation Detail. Oil paint on canvas, hand sewn and bound book A Cure for the Marriage Spirit, edition of 3, rocks. Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn. 2013
Free Love Digital c-print on aluminum. 16” x 20”. 2013. The photo of an open book to a poem about free love by Henry David Thoreau.
A Reeducation Installation views with furniture, books, lamp, photographs, painting, hand bound book (edition of 3), rocks, and rugs.
Herland Digital c-print on aluminum. 16” x 20”. 2013. This photo is titled after the utopian feminist novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915) about an all-women’s civilization ‘discovered’ by three male explorers. The photo presents evidence of this previous women’s society persisting in the present.
A Reeducation and Utopians Dance are part of my article published in Not Now! Now! published by Sternberg Press, 2014. The text, including an introduction by Elizabeth Freeman, from NOT NOW! NOW! is found HERE.
A Reeducation Detail. Oil paint on canvas, hand sewn and bound book A Cure for the Marriage Spirit, edition of 3, rocks.
Rehearse Wood, paint, speakers, 15 minute looped audio. 2008. Rehearse is a constructed space of theater that a viewer moves through. Two speakers emit a two-person play with a narrator. The subject of the play is loosely based on Duras' Hiroshima Mon Amour – of war discussed through the discourse of love and metonymic desire. Exhibited at the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, CT.
AUDIO EXCERPT HERE
Recall Fence post, pvc megaphone, speaker, 3-minute audio cd, 2006. Wanås Foundation sculpture park, Sweden. A speaker is housed inside a megaphone mounted on a fence post. Recall projects a form of medieval herding call (kulning) into a cow pasture everyday at 3:30pm for 3 minutes when the cows are being gathered for milking.
AUDIO HEARD HERE
The Gift Installation materials: wood, 6 speakers, audio equipment, 90-minute 6-channel audio piece. 2008. I hosted a dinner and recorded each voice. Viewers sit and hear the conversations replayed through dinner plate-like speakers. Sharon Hayes, Carlos Motta, Andrea Geyer, Gregory Sholette, Michael Blum, and myself converse about possibilities for social change and modes of protest. Referencing Marguerite Duras’ dinners in Paris, The Gift reflects on the student uprisings in Paris, 1968, comradeship, and the role of the artist in society. Exhibited at the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, CT. 2008
AUDIO EXCERPT HERE
The photographic series, Occupied, is pictured on the walls surrounding.
The Gift Installation, Wesleyan University Zilkha Gallery, CT
Utopians Dance Video still Duration: 6 minutes looped. 2013. The video monitor sits on the dance floor of Utopians Dance. It combines dancing feet, music, and subtitles. The subtitles intertwine dance calls with references to caring economies.
Recall Sound installation, Wanås Foundation, Sweden.
Solarium Installation with logs, willow branches, 6 speakers, 15-minute looped audio. Wanås Foundation in Sweden, 2006. Six chaises made of logs are arranged in a large circle under a canopy of tall trees. Above, tree branches form an open circle to create a natural window. A speaker is embedded in each chaise – each playing the same 15 minute audio narrative. The audio, 2 voices, tell the story of a woman’s journey to a place of convalescence while a male narrator prefaces each section stating the position of the sun in the sky as well as historical references to sun therapy. The script is loosely based on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.
Solarium Installation with logs, willow branches, 6 speakers, 15-minute looped audio. 2006.
Retain Peat spun with wool, linen, thread. Edition of 2. Wanås Foundation, Sweden. 2006. Retain is a uniform project for those that give tours through the art park of the Wanås Foundation in Sweden. As a group gathers in the konsthalle space for a tour to begin, the guide performatively puts on this work apron taken from nearby hooks. The design is based on a combination of the medieval tabard and contemporary Swedish work pants that have extensive outer pockets.
Retain is partially made of peat, a material found on the Wanås estate. Peat is believed to have healing properties. Peat products have been prescribed to treat nervousness, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and cancer.
Solarium Sound installation, Wanås Foundation, Sweden.
Retain Tabard for docents, Wanås Foundation, Sweden.
Inhalatorium Sound installation, Sculpture Center, NYC.
Numb Sound and video installation
Inhalatorium Solar salt, benches, light, 2-channel audio. Installed in a basement space of the Sculpture Center in NYC. 2004. Viewers walk over the crunchy salt to sit on the benches and listen. From one end of the space a male voice is heard and from the other end a female voice is heard. They are repeatedly holding a middle tone for as long as possible.
In Eastern Europe people go into salt mines for days and weeks at a time as a respiratory cure called spaeleotherapy. The great amount of negative ions that salt emits into the air purifies and cleans the air similar to the effect of a rainstorm. The meditative environment provides a soothing respite from daily stress. The basement site illuminated in orange simultaneously references a bomb shelter.
Numb Felt-covered Styrofoam mound with 2 seats, artificial poppies, video, audio on cone-shaped speaker devices. dimensions variable. 2005. Viewers sit on a seat in the poppy-covered mound to lay back, look up at the video suspended overhead, and listen to an audio narrative through the cone-shaped speakers. One hears a man’s voice recite historic passages written by poets under the influence of opiates or about opium. His voice is interspersed with a contemporary female voice. She refers to a man as if he is there or perhaps only in a ghost-like manner and rather out of it. The video was taken from a moving train of trackside green grasses and dots of red poppies that pass. This piece is about the desire to be numb and the result of becoming numb due to stress.
Rest Cure Installation with Sound
Rest Cure Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York. Concrete, wood, 4 wooden seats, 4 speakers, 17-min looped audio, audio equipment. Dimensions variable. 2021.
Rest Cure Socrates Sculpture Park, LIC, NY. Concrete, wood, 4 wooden seats, 4 speakers, 17-min looped audio, audio equipment. Dimensions variable. 2021. Taking up research into the New York City harbor islands — including the nearby Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island) — as former sites for the quarantined, incarcerated, and inferm, Rest Cure is an audio and sculpture installation, invites visitors to recline and listen. With a view to the East River, Roosevelt Island, and Manhattan, the poem heard airs our related sense of alienation under COVID but transforms it to an expanded network of care. The project asks, can the withdrawal from society that the pandemic caused have created a new political subjectivity, one that acknowledges our entangled nature with all others?
