Born to Die - By Noelle Marie Fitzsimmons
Breakthrough - by Noelle Fitzsimmons
A cadaver used to bring education to doctors is often described as a hand reaching from beyond the grave to grant new life.
This is its nature, an uncompromising unknown who decides it's time for your earthly vehicle to make room for someone else. Taxes and the guy with the scythe here to plant a new patch of the daisies you love. ( Sometimes, I think about this notion in the shower and hold it as a fantastic fantasy… I'd like to come back as a dolphin or a bird who also remembers my husband… Fly up high until I can see that he, she, they, saw me all along.)
Death tends to breathe the celestial in as if looking up is a constant vantage point for us to cling to.
When I was around 10, my teacher brought up casually that there's really no such thing as north. That space is made of spheres, and there really is no up. We were in Catholic school at the time, so there was a real challenge with death after that. Only the angels can float, and you sin and fall towards hell the older you get. After that, we jokingly described ourselves as "the ones not dead yet."
Kazuo Ishiguro plays with this childlike notion of death in his 2005 dystopian novel Never Let Me Go.
Students of a particular boarding school know that there is a mystery to their existence, but not what that mystery is. They are afraid of the novel's unknown qualities and begin to make up their own rules based on paranoia and hypothesis. After revealing that there will be a surprise ending, the book lovingly zeroes in on three primary friendships and lets you revel in their affection for each other. Owing to the pulp thriller makeup of this disclosure, the three friends' experiences can pierce through your heart in a way not otherwise possible. You cling to these characters, watching innocence clash with experience because of their inevitable end.
In Born to Die you will see Breakthrough, a hand-drawn heart-shaped fence with sculpted plants and flowers houses a projected video of a naked body breathing heavily.
This nude, laboring and bloody, grows flowers from seed out of her orifices. The body is filmed, and the flowers and plants are animated in acrylic marker. Two seemingly disparate methods support each other in nourishment. It's hard to tell if the body is giving life, dying, or both. The place between birth and death assesses the fluid nature of our being, and it asks what pierces through our own hearts when we consider our delivery, climax, and termination.
Video for Breakthrough
To the heart's left, a painting of watery flowers bursts through a fence and draws the eye to a tree, followed by an ATM sign.
ATM machines suggest as much of an opportunity as a block to experience. While sometimes you can, others you cannot. The same is true for accesses of all kinds, some and not others.
The heart's right extends to an acrylic painting of a man with a branch breaching the back of his head through his mouth.
The exact nature being birthed by the nude woman is ending a life, and nature wins. A purple storm in the tree-lined sky bleeds into his bright pink and red head.
Reading the installation from left to right, we see opportunity, a juxtaposition of states, and death.
A fading smile.
A car passenger's face pressed up against the window side asleep
unveils a dress of autumn leaves falling from your neighbor's tree
when the machine rolls past your line of vision.
A laundry list of necessities comes to mind.
Every morning the news reveals a pandemic, war, and projections of
complete and total loss of the environment.
Beyond the rules of the afterlife and death of the body, there are several valid interpretations of death (My favorite understanding, la petite mort, or little death, offers a momentary loss or weakening of consciousness on account of pleasure).
Roland Barthes discusses this loss of consciousness as a loss of pain. In The Pleasure of the Text, he famously states, "What I consume with pleasure is absence." Imagine pain as a substance. Watch it collect around the edges of pleasure waiting for you. A hole is nothing but what congregates around it.
An ice sculpture holding a glowing timer inside of it. The timer counts down from 7 hours and some minutes. When the iceberg melts completely, the alarm goes off. A video delay puts the 7 hours in context and addresses history as a means of learning, in order to save the future.
Born to Die also introduces Asked and Answered, an ice sculpture shaped like a glacial mass bears a glowing timer inside of it.
The timer counts down from 12 hours and some minutes. When the iceberg melts completely, the alarm goes off. I hope viewers will cling to each other and the environment and fail to accept the end of the natural world. Born to Die examines death as a form of change and asks that we love more than death can wound us.
Tamar - by Noelle Marie Fitzsimmons
In Tamar…
In kinetic sculpture made from the detritus of an abandoned house, a microphone and a Tascam recorder. Sonic feedback of the dress, set to motion by the wind, focuses the idea of absence onto the object. A soundtrack by Becky Packard plays every 6 minutes.