Séance for Dead Horse Bay

Séance for Dead Horse Bay (2016-2022) is an unbridled mashup of impulses, affinities, and collaborations. First, the animation honors the non-human ghosts living across New York City’s industrial waterways and specifically references the history of Brooklyn’s Dead Horse Bay. Through the 19th century and into the early 20th, the bay was a dumping ground for bodies from neighboring horse rendering plants that manufactured glue and fertilizer. Second, it examines Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies from the 1880s and the development of cinema out of the love of horses, money, and the science of vision. Third, it showers love on Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round. Fourth, it is a product of Albena Baeva’s Solidarity Machine, an AI instruction device that builds on Fluxus scores to question received notions of belonging, order, and hierarchy. Finally, it is a collaboration with composer Andrea Williams, whose score invites all the witches.

The project has evolved from a video sculpture made in 2016 for Marie Lorenz’s Flow Pool installation to a single-channel animation for Albena Baeva’s Solidarity Machine in 2022. 

Screenings and Exhibitions

  • 2023  Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Group Exhibition. Curator Sabine Gruffat.
  • 2023  FILE Festival, Sāo Paulo, Brazil, Group Exhibition.
  • 2022  Solidarity Machine, Projektraum Galerie M, Berlin, Germany, Group Exhibition, Curator Albena Baeva.
  • 2022  Light Year 92: If all bodies attract each other, how is it possible the Universe is expanding? Brooklyn,NY, Group Exhibition., Curator Eva Davidova.
  • 2020,  Search for Delicious, Microscope Gallery, NY, NY, part of my Solo Screening, Curator Andrea Monti. 
  • 2016  Underwater New York at Recess Art, part of Marie Lorenz’s Flow Pool installation. 

Séance for Dead Horse Bay within Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool

Below is imagery from 2016 when the project was a video sculpture that was part of Lorenz’s Flow Pool installation at Recess Art in NY, NY. At that point, Séance for Dead Horse Bay took shape as a small black raft with a screen playing a 2D animation of horses running, based on Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies. 

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