Here you go, Bernard, 2019-2020
performance with modified blue velvet curtains, gold curtain rod and hardware, lights, wireless lav mic, wireless speakers, and the artist’s breast
duration: variable
performance with modified blue velvet curtains, gold curtain rod and hardware, lights, wireless lav mic, wireless speakers, and the artist’s breast
duration: variable
This title is in reference to the Nursing Madonna’s alternate genre, “The Lactation of Saint Bernard”. In depictions of this religious fable, “[u]sually, Saint Bernard requests from the Virgin Mary to ‘monstra te esse matrem’ (‘show yourself to be a mother’), upon which she replies ‘ecce Bernarde’ (‘here you go, Bernard’)” and then she squirts her breast milk into his eye or mouth (Sperling 902-903).
A perfectly circular hole is cut in a 10' blue velvet curtain, out of which my left breast eerily emerges. Through this segmentation of my body I mirror the Nursing Madonna’s floating mammary. Behind the curtain, I exercise agency in an uncanny manner. Using a wireless lav microphone, and a wireless speaker placed elsewhere in the gallery, I converse with my visitors and occasionally sing “Blue Velvet” (1950).
Sperling, Jutta. “Squeezing, Squirting, Spilling Milk: The Lactation of Saint Bernard and the Flemish Madonna Lactans (ca. 1430-1530).” RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY, vol. 71, no. 3, pp. 868–918.
Performed on February 5, 2020 during Open Studios, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, AB) with Notes on Madonna and secretory.
A perfectly circular hole is cut in a 10' blue velvet curtain, out of which my left breast eerily emerges. Through this segmentation of my body I mirror the Nursing Madonna’s floating mammary. Behind the curtain, I exercise agency in an uncanny manner. Using a wireless lav microphone, and a wireless speaker placed elsewhere in the gallery, I converse with my visitors and occasionally sing “Blue Velvet” (1950).
Sperling, Jutta. “Squeezing, Squirting, Spilling Milk: The Lactation of Saint Bernard and the Flemish Madonna Lactans (ca. 1430-1530).” RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY, vol. 71, no. 3, pp. 868–918.
Performed on February 5, 2020 during Open Studios, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, AB) with Notes on Madonna and secretory.