version 1 projected 2 screen video installation
version 2 single channel version with 3 screens on one monitor or screen
version 3 collaged photograph 20×30 on aluminum mount with back frame
Part of Monet’s wryly humorous eco-feminist series Völva Saga which references the real life Norse seeresses, mediators and healers who functioned at the highest tiers of power during the Viking period, this work involves performance video methodologies collaged with found footage. A powerful Völva is champion for the bees and for people with autoimmune diseases. In elaborate costuming which references operatic Vikings iconography, female Tantric lineages, Norse rune language, and pop culture, she floats amongst bees and infrared flowers (as bees see them), and the profuse spraying of pesticides, other toxic substances, and text. Völva Saga Silenced addresses the parallels between the human autoimmune epidemic, and the health crises facing the world’s bee populations. The work is inspired by Monet’s 26 year life threatening struggle with the neuro-immune diseases ME/CFS and Environmental Illness. It parallels the discrimination that she and hundreds of thousands like her have faced within a medicine model which does not look at environmental toxic contamination as a causative factor of disease, and the mainstream bee-keeping industry which is bought out by corporate chemical companies who deny the detrimental impact of toxic substances on bees. It parallels both groups to ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of our ailing world. All of these elements interact within a dreamy and shamanic terrain inspired by Monet’s bedridden period when she was too weak to speak or move, and the marvelous transmutation of her spirit, psyche and body during this lucid time, making a work that both transcendent and educational.
This work was debuted as a 24 hour 2 screen projected performance video installation, for Almost Public/Semi Exposed the annual installed performance art festival in the Window Gallery of Artist Television Access in San Francisco November 15, 2019.
