ART-PRESENTATION: Becca Albee
Becca Albee is an American musician and visual artist who was a founding member of the band Excuse 17 which was an early pioneer in the Riot grrrl and Third-wave feminism movements. Using photography and the moving image, Becca Albee’s work draws on an array of visual and printed sources, variously culled from personal archives, official repositories, and the public realm. Throughout, she employs strategies of re-photography, cropping, and overlays in an effort to interweave disparate narratives.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MIT List Visual Arts Center Archive
Becca Albee frequently shifts the context, content, and meaning of her source materials that include found photographs, film negatives, and other objects. List Projects 20: Becca Albee, the artist’s first institutional solo presentation engages two distinct sites of research and production (the archive of the late artist Robert Blanchon and Brooklyn’s Plumb Beach) to reflect on deep and mortal time scales, as well as the enduring impact of a relationship frozen in memory. The installation features new videos Becca Albee filmed on late-spring nights in 2019 at Plumb Beach, where she observed and documented Atlantic horseshoe crabs spawning during the full and new moons. Initially volunteering to aid in population monitoring, Albee returned to film and photograph the arthropods, their surroundings, and the abstract markings they left behind. In her video recordings, horseshoe crabs glint purple and green under the glow of ultraviolet light that seems to recast the prehistoric species as extraterrestrial beings. Impressions made by the horseshoe crabs appear in a series of silver gelatin prints presented in artist’s frames, each painted a different shade of blue. The colors reference the hue of the crabs’ blood, which is prized in the medical industry for its ability to quickly detect bacterial endotoxins and form protective clots around them. This distinct property, and the blood’s use in biomedicine, resonates with Albee’s own experience of living with a blood clotting disorder. Reminiscent of Martian landscapes, her photographs from Plumb Beach document the abstract markings left by these so-called “living fossils” when spawning on the sand. Albee describes the beach as a site that is “vibrating with layers of movement—biological, social, sexual, tidal” all evocative of a set of interests that thread throughout her oeuvre. The contrasting timescales of the beach find a surprising parallel in the archive, where so-called “ephemera” are conserved, at least theoretically, in perpetuity. A postcard announcing Albee’s 1999 exhibition “Photographs on Ice” at the Hanes Art Center, Chapel Hill, bears her image of an outdoor ice rink freshly etched with the arcs of a skater’s passage. The verso of the card reveals a note from Albee to the late artist Robert Blanchon; she had sent the invitation to him on the occasion of the show. The two met when Albee was a student and Blanchon a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, in 1998, just prior to his death a year later from AIDS-related complications at the age of 33. Albee recently re-encountered the card while immersing herself in Blanchon’s archive at the Fales Special Collections & Archives at New York University. For the List Center exhibition, it is reproduced in an open edition and available as a takeaway artwork, attesting to their brief but impactful friendship and his lasting influence on her approach to making art. Blanchon’s presence recurs throughout the exhibition: Albee’s attentive photographs of select materials from his ephemera, artworks, and papers subtly suggest a continuation of their past conversations and connection. The material traces of memories and fleeting moments reverberate throughout the exhibition, bringing the seemingly incongruous sites of the beach and the archive into poetic proximity.
Info: MIT List Visual Arts Center, Kendall Square, 20 Ames St, Cambridge, MA, Duration: 12/12/19-9/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://listart.mit.edu
