What was Lot´s Wife´s Name?
Video-sculpture. Salt, paper maché, video projection, and monitor.
Two channels video. DigiBeta.
PLAY VIDEO
A Pillar of Salt
A pillar of salt gives the slightest hint of a female form; a veiled woman crystallized. She appears not in the black robes of burqua, silent shadow of a hidden human - rather, she is the pure white of the angels that rescued her... and doomed her. She is white and shining like a desert moon.
A spirit seems to move within the pillar, forever looking back, again and again. She is a fallen angel, the Good Wife who chose her own will at last. She is the purity of her virgin daughters, the nurturing mother, the desiccated crone. She is a Medusa, frozen by her reflection, the faces of the women she left behind. The real Medusa was no monster. She was a fighting queen.
What was Lot's Wife's Name? is an installation which sets the calcified myth, a pillar of salt with video projection, in dialectic standoff with an advocate of righteous violence, a preacher of the airwaves, a disembodied monitor. Both story and teller are illuminated objects, animated by light. Both are steadfast characters, maintaining their positions, repeating and repeating
Lot's Wife: Yvette Torell. Angel: Nicola Ferrier. Grateful acknowledgments to Celia Gilbert, DngerVideo, and Susanne Themlitz for their inspiration and assistance.
© Clea T. Waite 1999