The feast project book and photographic installation: "Christy Johnson & 33 Confessors" Video Installation: "The Set"

This artist’s project represents four years of research (in part funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Council, UCR California Museum of Photography, and UCCA, UK (now titled University for the Creative Arts). The work has developed across platforms and resulted in a number of linked pieces, which extend and expand Johnson’s interests in the interface between the archive, the book, the screen, and the museum. The project has three distinct components: photographic site-specific installation, video triptych (projection/dual monitor work) and a published artist’s book distributed by Art Data, London. The Feast Project was previewed and launched in April 2007 in the Oculorium Gallery/Project Space at the UCR California Museum of Photography in the USA. This work represents a convergence of three strands of inquiry: identity and the body, sites of memory, and the archive. The work as a whole aims to explore how the female body is socially and sexually constructed through transformative religious ritual; contemporary practices of intervention and the museum; collecting, re(collecting) and the relationship of artefact and memory; and the archive as a site of reclamation and narration. Through critical intervention, found material has been mobilised and the ’record’ put in question. The Feast Project operates as a set of interchanges between then and now, and reclaims a space for the reactivation of identity. ARTIST’S BOOK © 2007 Feast: Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors Publication ISBN 978-1-870522-49-6 208 pages, b/w Hardback Edition of 1,000 27.5 x 22 x 2 cm Distribution: Art Data, London, UK USA Book Launch and Artist’s Talk 28 April 2007 University of California Riverside, California Museum of Photography UK Book Launch and window work "Missal" 20 September 2007, bookartbookshop, London Feast: Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors is a performative proposition, where levels of enactment and re-enactment are in dialogue. Johnson is particularly interested in the document as a ritual space, and how the book form can become a site for discursive interplay. She has created and drawn upon two distinct but related archives: found photographic imagery (the appropriated record) and contemporary spoken narratives whereby the past and present are brought into contact with each other. She has sought and collected hundreds of First Communion photographic images from various countries in the Americas and Europe. The anonymous portraits span the years 1877-1970. The bookwork features the photographs of prepubescent girls and explores their performative staging as 'virginal brides' for the public communal event, as well as the private photographic record. Alongside the visual archive, Johnson has conducted interviews with thirty-three women of differing social backgrounds and nationalities, ages and current involvement and position to religion. The edited text excerpts have been taken from the audio archive and juxtaposed with the found images in order to oppose, support, challenge, complement, contradict, subvert, or go beyond the meanings offered by the photographs themselves. At the end of the work, three essays provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the project: •Archival Memories: Between History and Experience (pp.182-89) Margherita Sprio, Lecturer and Scheme Director MA Art and Film, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Essex, UK •Retrieval and Transmittal in a Fictive Photographic Experience (pp.190-97) Catherine Clinger, Visiting Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, USA •All in White for the Feast: Whiteness in the Christian Imaginary (pp.198-205) Jenny Daggers, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies, Liverpool Hope University, UK PHOTOGRAPHIC INSTALLATION Oculorium Gallery UCR/ California Museum of Photography, USA Curated by Ciara Ennis Feast: Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors 108 - 92 h x 61 w cm Lambda prints on Fugi archival paper This floor to ceiling installation plundered the Feast archive, a depository of more than 400 found First Communion commemorative pictures from Europe and the Americas (1877-1970). A selection of 108 images enlarged and printed in colour (digital photographic Lambda prints) were presented in a three-row grid format on four walls that literally enveloped and surrounded the viewer - an army of pre-teen girls dressed in white. The anonymous photographic portraits explore and critique the initiatory performance of gender in ritual contexts (both sacred and secular), particularly addressing notions of purity and contamination. These monumentalised images become celebratory markers of an emergent prepubescent sexuality and desire. The fetishised ‘virginal bride’ motif once safely and happily in place, now reaches the challenging excesses of the fantastically bizarre. The size is a renunciation of where these photographs were originally placed, and the spectator confronted by a re-viewing. The sheer scale of the work exposes the physical nature of the First Communion event (both in the church and photographer’s studio) and sets out to deconstruct this important symbolic moment. Female sexuality is not located in a comfortable place … it is not clear where it is … it is not fixed. Confronting the images, two voices emerge in dialogue (wall texts) where amnesia and sharp recall explore the flux of denial and excess. VIDEO INSTALLATION Project Space UCR/ California Museum of Photography, USA Curated by Ciara Ennis The Set Video triptych with continuous sound (projection/two 382 cm monitors)& prayer cushion seating 32 minute, synchronized loop (5 x 5 minutes sequences) This installation explores the authorial nature of the First Communion rituals - rote performances in the Church move seamlessly to mock performances in the studio. The Set draws on the artifice of the recorded climatic moment (fixed image). This video work is a continuous re-enactment of five photographic portraits drawn from the Feast archive, and points to the absent, unseen event that is re-done (staged) for the photographer. The representational conventions that are to be adhered to (as with wedding photography) are exposed simply through a reflexive approach where the children hold their performances in the anticipation of the release. Gender as performance is explored in terms of how boys and girls are expected to behave. Being good and acting as you are told breaks down in each of the five sequences with each child monitoring the other. The sound of a cough, sneeze, whisper or movement of the body reverberates in the studio, breaking and punctuating the monotonous real-time action

PTSD from Childhood Trauma as a Precursor to Attachment Issues

The past 20 years have been turbulent regarding Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), with conflicting research about its causes, effects, treatment, and prognosis. The current diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5 fails to adequately address this disorder. A number of deviant and maladaptive behaviors common amongst children with RAD are not even mentioned in the diagnostic criteria. As such, the diagnostic definition is almost unidentifiable or incompatible with real-life conduct manifestations of the disorder. Rather, this author contends that RAD is foundationally a unique and extreme form of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from Early Childhood Trauma. The child endured unspeakable neglect and/or abuse in his early years by someone who was supposed to protect him, and he, understandably, is terrified of trusting anyone lest that person harm him, too. These children dissociate and experience PTSD flashbacks to prior abusers when a new caregiver yells at them or has angry, disapproving eyes. The underlying issues are that child does not feel safe and does not trust his parents to protect him, due to past trauma. This author contends that this is the core causation of RAD and the myriad of behaviors that RAD children employ to maintain control of their environment. This etiological stance naturally leads to treatment implications. Treatment becomes systemic as well as individual. An explicit and detailed case study ties together all of the elements of this new etiology by addressing the presenting issues, case conceptualization, and treatment plan for a family with an adopted child

The Proclamation Island moment: making Antarctica Australian

It is January 1930 and the restless Southern Ocean is heaving itself up against the frozen coast of Eastern Antarctica as the exploring ship Discovery shoves its way through the pack. One of the key moments of the British, Australian, and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE)—is about to occur: the expedition is about to succeed in its primary mission. Douglas Mawson, the expedition's Australian leader, ascends to the island's bleak summit. There, he and his crew assemble a mound of stones and insert into it the flagpole they've carried with them across the ocean. Mawson reads an official proclamation of territorial annexation, the photographer Hurley shoots the moment on film, and one of the men hauls the Union Jack up the pole. In the freezing wind, the men take off their hats and sing "God Save the King." They deposit a copy of the proclamation into a metal canister and affix this to the flagpole. The men row back to the Discovery; Mawson returns to his cabin and writes up the event. A crucial moment in Antarctica’s spatial history has occurred: on what Mawson has aptly named Proclamation Island, Antarctica has been produced as Australian space. But how, exactly, does this production of Antarctica as a spatial possession work? How does this moment initiate the transformation of six million square kilometres of Antarctica—42% of the continent—into Australian space? The answer to this question lies in three separate, but articulated cultural technologies: representation, the body of the explorer, and international territorial law. This article attends to the ways in which these spatialising forces together 'nationalise' Antarctica by transforming it into Australian national space. Mawson's BANZARE performance on Proclamation Island is a moment in which the legal, the physical, and the textual clearly intersect in the creation of space as a national possession. Australia did not take possession of forty-two percent of Antarctica after BANZARE by law, by exploration, or by representation alone. The Australian government built its Antarctic space with letters patent. BANZARE produced Australia's Antarctic possession through the physical and legal rituals of flag-planting, proclamation-reading, and exploration. BANZARE further contributed to Australia's polar empire with maps, journals, photos and films, and cadastral lists of the region’s animals, minerals, magnetic fields, and winds. The laws of "discovery of terra nullius" and of "the spirit of possession" coalesced these spaces into a territory officially designated as Australian. It is crucial to recognise that the production of nearly half of Antarctica as Australian space was, and is not a matter of discourse, of physical performance, or of law alone. Rather, these three cultural technologies of spatial production are mutually imbricated; none can function without the others, nor is one reducible to an epiphenomenon of another. This article examines the ways in which six million square kilometres of Antarctic ice were, and continue to be, produced as Australian national space

Treed

London Arts Board Award to Individual Artists, 1998 Bethnal Green Open Studio, London, UK A hunting term used to describe the process of pursuit. The Dictionary definition: v. 1. trans. To drive to or up a tree; to cause to take refuge in a tree, as a hunted animal; hence Colloq., to corner. Also fig. To put into difficulty or ‘fix'. TREED sets out to examine the persistence and resistance of certain patterns of looking and interaction within family groups. The project draws from archive 8mm home movie footage shot in California between the years 1963-1970. The work uncovers and sets out to make visible the ‘undirected’ footage that was authored by Johnson’s father – ‘the ‘unofficial’ material that her mother mocked, ignored and dismissed as not fitting into the family picture. This paternal gaze considered unrepresentative of the agreed familial narrative, consists of documentation of conifer trees and pursuit of her mother’s image. Scale plays a part in monumentalising the capture of the ‘missed’ image (mother). The quick moving, protesting subject is fixed. Seven filmic frames become photographic objects, displayed in sequenced form (1.2 m h x 1.8 m w). In juxtaposition, the trees are stand-ins for the absent subject (father). The obsessive tracking is emphasised by repetition, and the height of the trees de-monumentalised through scale. What is seen to be important is measured against what is fleeting. Seven small monitors (14”) are sequenced in the space, each showing a different tree, yet looking at the same action

Literary Exposures for an Ecological Age

This paper argues that exposures through literature to human fragility and vulnerability, which are default modes of life within the relational collective on-page, rehearse critical engagements for life off-page during a time of climate change

A Model Of W Virginis With Rv Tauri Characteristics : Notes

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The dynamics of variable stars

Harmonics, pulsation amplitude, and vibratory motion of Cepheid variable star