Abigail Child

Reflections, refractions, formal play deconstructs narrative and locates the sub-version. Sex and class are refigured and exchanged: the princess becomes the maid; the maid becomes the queen.

In collaboration with Gary Sullivan & Mehboob Khan's AAN. A reshaping of Khan's classic Bollywood feature, locating its narrative tropes against mis-translated subtitles - becoming "multi-lingual" in the maneuver.

Mirror World is an extension of my original montage, borrowing from my earlier Mayhem in its wrenching of narrative causality, and discovering with digital printing ways to wreck havoc on our perceptions of the world. -Abigail Child

On Mirror World: “Child’s cutting techniques reconfigure sensory/cinematic perception altogether. She often splits the screen down the middle, creating a mirror image: in Mirror World a woman’s body gets carved into slivers that recombine along the middle seam to create dancing hairy vulvas. Or a typical Bollywood group dance scene takes on an additional visual shimmer. When the screen splits during a subtitled scene in To and No Fro we are catapulted into a theater of spectacle and sound. Scenes with cameras and other tools of the cinema remind us that Child is constructing our view, but with gleeful humor (the Mirror World film loop “ends” with the main woman character tossing her head back in a long laugh). Child stops short of noise and confusion: a slight back beat (a cymbal; a tabla) steadies first one soundtrack, then another; a Strauss waltz builds in intensity and we slip into familiar territory…at least until Child rocks our world once again by turning the footage of the dancers on a slant, or sideways, and even almost (but never predictably) upside-down, before veering off into another quasi-plot. Breathless yet? Hints of narrative are suggested (a glance, a movement, a chord, a subtitle or syllable), intensified (through arrhythmic repetition, intercutting, juxtaposition), and finally thrown overboard (or at least in every conceivable direction). Hindi overlaps with Spanish, English, many styles of music, and sound effects, and the aesthetic of interruption is itself interrupted with steady long shots of landscape and gesture. Child’s writings occasionally appear, like less didactic, more evocative versions of Jenny Holzer’s maxims (“as if to myself”; Every person’s story starts with some other person”; “All humans are unreal”; “Think of me as the self-willed beauty…that is what the world thinks I am”). Child, a self-declared “maximalist,” creates a poetic condensation of contemporary society within the space of one small room.” —Karen Schiff

On Mouth to Mouth: “Even while running culture through a linguistic sieve of structures and styles and sampling Internet snippets, her humor is unfailing and her heart is all-too-human.” —Charles Borkhuis

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