You Were Drifting

source: margetlong

Marget Long’s art practice is centered around the bodily experience and sensory politics of photographic technologies, now and in the past.

Her artist’s book, Flash + Cube (1965-1975) [Punctum Books, 2012], traces the sensory links between light, war, history and photography through a forgotten piece of technology, the Sylvania flash cube. Long’s earlier photographs, made under the skylight at Mathew Brady’s 19th century daguerreotype studio, explore the tangled “felt” relationship between history, photography and iconic sites of cultural production.

In her new project, Mirage Mirage, Long makes artworks instigated by the optical phenomenon of the mirage using photographs, video and historical texts. Cross-disciplinary in approach, Long looks to the mirage as both a material and abstract site of promise, illusion and vanishing. Long sees the mirage as a mediated “process”: simultaneously analog and virtual. In her words, “a mirage is a queer and spectacular refractive tool through which we can reflect on our attachments to photography, virtuality, mediated geographies such as Google Earth, and more generally, the absent presence we experience in screen-based exchanges.”

Marget Long received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was the recipient of the T.C. Colley Award in photography in 2002. She lectures frequently on photography, new media, and visual culture, most recently at Yale University’s Photographic Memory Workshop and at the Center for Visual Cultures at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has been screened and exhibited at many venues including Anthology Film Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, British Film Institute, Exit Art, Kunsthaus Bregenz and American Cinémathèque in Los Angeles.
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source: margetlong

You Were Drifting
25 minute video loop, 2013

You Were Drifting is a two-channel video installation that combines found footage from twenty films that depict the experience of a mirage. The stacked monitors create a secondary mirage effect; the inverted lower monitor “refracts” the scene in the upper monitor.

The video builds a meta narrative in which mirages continually appear on the horizon and then slip away: presence and absence, desire and impossibility, vision and failure are played out through the bodies of lost souls on the desert.