EXHIBITIONS: BLACK LIGHT MONOLOGUE IN THREE PARTS, 2017 (Vimeo password: “Laurel Sparks”)
Written and performed by Laurel Sparks
Sound score by Shawn Hansen
Video by Jared Buckhiester
Black Light Monologue in Three Parts is a performance video by Laurel Sparks with a sound score by Shawn Hansen. In tandem with her painting practice, Laurel Sparks writes alchemical texts combining fragments from three experiential sources: actions, dreams and influential quotes. Each element is extracted from disparate moments in time — be they weeks, months or days apart — and woven into a unified form. Adapted from the 1960s Third Mind experiments of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Sparks’ systems reorder time and transient phenomena into a synthesis of unlikely parts. Mirroring the transmutation of alchemy, the artist frames her living body as a vessel of physical, unconscious and external stimuli, systematically broken down and transformed to unlock hidden visions.
For Liz Collins’ Energy Field, Sparks pays homage to 1980s cult film Liquid Sky by braiding the protagonist’s monologue into fragments of her own thoughts, dreams and actions. The distorted phrases of Dark With Ashes (part 1) and Annebrients (part 2) are read with pedagogical swagger in the dark from handwritten neon text on oversized black cardboard tablets. Wearing a cloak of fabric chains weighted by bells, the artist paces slowly while shining an ultraviolet flashlight on the glowing words. The text traverses majestic, quotidian and philosophical imagery, at once irrational and poetically vivid.
Structured like the figure/ground of a painting, the voice and soft bell chimes of the cloak merge in and out of a shuddering drone of sound. Textures within the sound field crunch and crackle from recordings of lightning hitting Earth’s magnetic field. Moments of electronic strikes add elements of horror which are intermittently offset by absurd phrasing. For the third part, Witches Get into Show Business, Sparks sits cross-legged in front of a small easel where she places the text panels. Doubling as a vanity mirror, she reads the text while applying neon paint to her face from small glowing pots of color. As a direct reference to Liquid Sky, she uses her hand to paint her entire face white which hovers like a glowing mask in the dark. Using a different finger for each color, she then draws lines of green, yellow, red and blue to separate her face into compass quadrants, each corresponding with four cardinal directions and cosmic elements.
At the end of the monologue she counts with three glowing fingers to the words: Energy. Liquid. Sky. The elemental content of the words combined with the number three make reference to the three chemical stages of alchemy. As a gesture of completion, Sparks drops into stillness with eyes closed and face glowing as Hansen’s sounds score crackles, zips and surges before fading to silence.