Within visual arts, a ‘line of flight’ implies a perspective that creates an impression of removal, erasure, or disappearance. This concept is similar to that of a vanishing point—a removed position or perspective that can lead to an area of convergence. My thesis work, Line of Flight, is a multimodal piece that articulates critical and significant female experiences and brings those stories into the public sphere, a space from which women are often excluded or marginalized. The dialogue featured in the piece serves as both commentary on and critique of the female experience. The act of placing these private conversations into public space serves to confront a point of erasure in our culture: the process whereby women and a multiplicity of women’s voices are often ignored, dismissed, or neglected.

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Through a series of thirteen informal, digitally recorded interviews I collected stories from women artists around the globe. Our conversations were unsettlingly similar (though culturally different). After cultivating these dialogues, through thoughtful collation and comparison, I was able to identify a framework for my own media making, a conceptual blueprint that informed my visual responses to my conversations with the women. The three thematics were: 1) gendered expectations and expressions, 2) identity formation, and 3) space, urgency, and insistence. These three throughlines functioned as scaffolding which inspired my photography and media creation, in such a way that I might publicly illustrate these women’s stories. I describe that process throughout this paper, as well as the following: my interviewing methodologies; my approach to creating accompanying visuals; several challenges I faced throughout production; my artistic contribution via a final public exhibition; and my hopes for the project moving forward.

In her introduction to No Regrets, editor Dayna Tortorici writes, “I knew that women speak to one another differently in rooms without men.”2 Within mainstream culture, it is a rarity for women’s conversations with one another to be afforded a public setting and direct cultural acknowledgement. Space is never neutral. Instead, it is continuously defined by political and cultural implications, meanings, and significance.3 Instead of encouraged, unrestricted expression, these conversations are often relegated to subaltern counterpublics.4 This relegation means that space is perpetually complicated.

 

According to Reus et al., space is “never critically transparent, and its artistic representation is always intentional, dialectical and culturally embedded.”5 Space is continuously coded with multiple meanings regarding race, gender6, class, sexuality, and nationality: “Multiple practices limit who enters or is comfortable in public spaces and what people are able to do in these spaces.”7 Line of Flight serves to forcibly confront the unspoken hostility women (specifically, female media makers) often face in public space. The piece highlights women’s shared experiences so that one may encounter them directly and with a sense of self-awareness. It is this interaction, as well as our reaction to these encounters, that I investigate here. This process is situated within a rich socio-cultural history wherein women utilize traditional gender roles (or buck tradition all together) in order to bring private issues into public space. Organized acts of resistance, such as Women in Black, SlutWalk, and Gay Pride, serve to repurpose and reshape public space. These demonstrations challenge cultural norms and cultivate “public cultures that reflect the people involved, their belief systems, and contemporary cultural conversations.”8 While the women involved in this project are not explicitly claiming public space for themselves, public expression of complex gendered expectations of performance may provide these women with critical agency and socio-political capital, as a result of their outspoken participation within Line of Flight.

 

Through thirteen informal, digitally recorded interviews, I gathered a collection of responses from an international selection of female photographers, filmmakers, poets, and speakers; the responses are both pertinent and impactful. A textual analysis of my conversations with the women elucidated the three vital thematics, present in each woman’s set of interview responses. I identified these different categories (listed above) and used them to inform my own original moving image, gif, and cinemagraph works. The placement of private dialogue generated from our personal, one-on-one interactions into the public sphere, functions as a vehicle for confrontation, reflection, and continuation of these vital conversations. Through a series of twenty-one animated gifs, looping cinemagraphs, and textual pairings, the audience is afforded the opportunity to look and listen to the complex multiplicity of voices presented in the exhibition.

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As a documentary piece, Line of Flight requires and encourages the act of speaking, looking, and listening: I spoke to each woman, I looked (literally and figuratively) to represent our conversations publicly, and I requested that audience members interpret and listen to our conversations, presented to them in the exhibition. In order to visually incorporate the dialogue conducted with my participants into the piece, I chose to position my original media in conversation with short, poetic excerpts from said dialogue. I parsed and selected quotations meant to work in concert as recognizable adages, while remaining specific enough to provide insight into the variety of encounters the women experienced. This process mirrored the limited ways in which women are allowed to speak and express themselves publicly. The fragmented pairing represents the unnerving bifurcation between women’s public and private conversations. Traditionally short in duration, gif and cinemagraph file formats also served to create a fragmentary viewing experience that functions as a means of subversion. This process disrupts the normative public discourse by forcing an audience to encounter the series of curated, fragmentary, expressive visual moments.

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Line of Flight was shown publicly in a joint exhibition at a makerspace (1301 Walnut) in downtown Boulder, Colorado on April 3rd, 2018. Through the exhibition of their work, an artist (inadvertently or not) participates in the construction of a social space. As one physically projects an image, they change the physical space as well as the social dynamics of said space.46 Line of Flight was purposefully projected along three barren, grey cement walls (roughly 20ftx15ft) within the makerspace. Upon entering the space, the audience could choose to encounter the work or attempt to ignore it entirely. This viewing process mirrors the women’s articulated experience. Relatively modest in scope, the projection was meant to create a feeling of unease in its repetition and banality.

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In this way, my approach was informed by works such as Dara Birnbaum’s, “Kiss The Girls: Make them Cry.” Birnbaum appropriates multiple clips from sitcoms and game shows and utilizes repetition in order to actively deconstruct representations of femininity. Through this process she presents her audience with “discursive constructions of gender otherwise impalpable in the narrative flow.”47 In a similar vein, instead of a linear examination of the piece, my audience is encouraged to revisit and analyze the clips, over and over. This looping process is unsettling as viewers are forced to encounter the recorded subjects repeatedly. This act of repetition48 reflects our gendered expectations of performance, mirroring the sexist experiences the women encounter repeatedly in their own lives, reiterated time and time again through the looping video.49

The duration of the project became quite important throughout production and particularly so in relation to the public exhibition of the project. I understood that the composition of the piece, as well as the format of the exhibition space, would impact audience

members differently than if the work were part of a festival lineup or traditional documentary screening. I knew my audience would enter into the exhibition space at random, over a variable span of time. This viewing process is diametrically opposed with a particular assemblage of a seated group at a specific time. Instead, the repetition utilized here opens up spectatorship that isn’t possible in a traditional screening or theatrical venue.

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Intended audience takeaway for this piece includes critical reflection and consciousness building. As much of the media within Line of Flight is regarded as uncanny, I decided to treat it as such. The uncanny is driven by the “compulsion to repeat, and that compulsion is automatic. Rather than a simple reaction to technology, the uncanny is an intentional, embodied (even if symptomatic) response to ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.’”51 Multi-projection within the exhibition space was purposeful as I wanted to encourage audience members to consciously engage with the work, an important component of the piece that I hope to carry into future iterations of the piece.

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This work has the potential to function well in a variety of public spaces. The exhibition on April 3rd served as an initial prototype. I’ve imagined a number of adaptations of the work, including: projection within the public spaces where I captured the visuals, visual contributions from the women themselves that best represent their experiences, auditory communication between the women, interplay between visuals from a series of projectors that overwhelm the public space within a room. I see this piece as constantly evolving, with the ability to function in a number of different settings. Inherent power lies in the placement of these conversations within the context of the exhibition. While the primary audience for this piece exists offline, the work will be featured digitally on my personal portfolio and thus available for public access.

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Women experience certain condemnation because of their gender, and many often come to expect it. When shame (associated with certain gendered activities) is involved, “an ethic of silence keeps women isolated from one another, but most of all, it keeps us from realizing the political issues at the root of our travails.”52 Line of Flight serves to combat this silencing. At the onset of production I was resistant to filming the ‘everyday.’ I was hesitant to ask an audience to engage with, and spend time looking at, seemingly mundane, quotidian visuals. Too often, women’s art is imagined as “small and careful, or petty and domestic, or vain, or sassy, or confessional. We might expect them to be sentimental or melodramatic” but we don’t expect them to be great.53 Instead, I’ve begun to recognize that there is inherent power in the expression of everyday experience, which challenged my unarticulated assumptions and realigned my understanding of myself as an artist and advocate.

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Line of Flight has also allowed me to think through the use of space in my work: filming in unceremoniously familiar spaces, building connections over digital space, and projecting in a large exhibition space. As I worked through questions of adequacy (in terms of representation and technical production), my commitment to the basic tenets of this project remained vigorous throughout. I grappled continuously with decisions regarding the most powerful and appropriate avenues of visual representation for the women’s conversations. Ultimately, this piece allowed me to identify power in nuanced work and quotidian visuals—something that I may have overlooked in an attempt at a more obtuse or grandiose project. Through this process, I’ve honed my ability to produce unsettling palindromes as well as utilize cinemagraphs in an unconventional way, helping to move the medium out of advertising and into a documentary mode.

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My communication with the women in this project, from Paris to Barcelona to Sao Paulo to the United States, has only provided me with more resolve to continue our creative dialogue. These women have offered vital insight and led me to discover and examine my own biases and expectations. In the future, I aim to give the women more agency throughout production, particularly within the initial stages of our dialogue. My hope is that this will allow for a larger number of women to decide to engage with the project and express themselves fully throughout. At the onset of production, two Pakistani writers initially agreed to participate in the project. They did not, however, respond to my interview questions and thus did not continue on with our conversation. Perhaps, allowing them to formulate a framework of expression for their own stories would provide more room for better representation and growth throughout the project. I hope that allowing for increased agency from each woman will facilitate even deeper, more impactful dialogue (and subsequently more impactful media from said dialogue). As an imperfect conduit for this process, I hope to continue to speak, look, and listen with a number of diverse, powerful women’s voices.

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This project provides a particular artistic platform that showcases the challenges facing female media makers and, more specifically, largely unrecognized facets of lived female experience. These topics are vital in that they are often excluded from our overwhelmingly white, patriarchal, western cultural narrative. This work attempts to bring others who are unaware, or rarely participate in this dialogue into the conversation. Line of Flight is designed to serve as a work of solidarity for women aware of these lived realities. Ultimately, this piece challenges our core understanding of identity and speaks to those who are willing to actively engage and listen.

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Please find the full work here: