MOLLIE McKINLEY STUDIO

EXISTENTIAL MARINA / PROJECT STATEMENT

Directed and Photographed by Mollie McKinley
2011, HD video, ORT 50:00 min


In my attempts to find an experiential intersection between the ideas of existentialism and mysticism, I worked with Canadian performance artist Adriana Disman and with New York philosopher/performer, Aaron Finbloom, to create this site-specific performative video work.

The central fixture of the installation space I created is a blue and silver rowboat which I embedded in a patch of ferns at the edge of a forest in the Catskills of New York. A log moors the boat to the earth with a rope. I have wrapped another enormous tugboat rope, pulled from the banks of the Hudson River, around a dead tree that flanks the right side of the boat. Other pieces of scavenged jetsam and flotsam from the shores of the Hudson help create the feel of a displaced marina: nets, aged buoys, and sun-bleached orange life vests.

The boat has been filled with clean water by hauling buckets from the nearest water source down a hill to the installation space. A hole is dug on the front left side of the boat. A fireplace set of brass duck-heads are placed next to it, and I instruct the performers that they must build a fire and use this set to manage it; the only other action they must complete is that one of them must end up wrapped in the fishing net. The net pours from the inside of the boat, out and over to cover the nearby ferns.

My directorial meetings with the performers were dialogues about the philosophical underpinnings of the piece: What actions define either mysticism or existentialism, and in what actions do they meet? What is self and what is other? What are the poles of either that thereby create a threshold, a place of liminality? How does the hole which I dug in the earth define sexual metaphor? What is the role of desire in this space? The actors must take responsibility for all of their own actions and directions, keeping these various questions in mind. I ask them to refrain from speaking in their performance. The piece is entirely improvised within the give framework. I do not interrupt them except to pause their action (they must freeze in mid performance) to move the camera to better capture a certain action. The video, although edited, is shown almost in its entirety of nearly fifty minutes in length.