The New York artist makes herself as vulnerable as can be, exposing her organs in the cold light of the screen
What are we looking at? We can perhaps discern from the greyscale fuzz, the varying degrees of white patches, fanning out from a point in shapes hard to parse, that this is an ultrasound display. But what are we trying to see in the scan? There is no baby or foetal development, no heart, no kidney, no liver, no needle to pierce through the night like a ship. But it moves in time with a voiceover. A mouth, surely? Yes. We are, quite literally, mechanically, watching someone speak.
More specifically, we are watching the artist’s mouth, reading to us. This is Mary Helena Clark’s Recital (2024), itself enveloping her essayistic text ‘Neighboring Animals’. Much of Clark’s practice to date, working in video, image, sound and installation, has concerned the dichotomy of ‘human’ and ‘animal’, and the ways in which, by shifting or blurring those semantic lines, we might reconsider our own condition, and our relation to others. None more so than here, as Clark, in exposing her own animal form, brings us into ours – and isolates the absurdity of the things we understand to be true of ourselves. “Most evolutionary ‘novelties’”, she explains, as we watch the muscle and sinew undulating across the scan, “are the coopting of an existing system.” Like the human mouth, “whose teeth and tongue… are critical in pronunciation, but they did not evolve for that function. They evolved to bite.”
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: Mary Helena Clark, Recital, 2024
13 February–9 March 2026
© Courtesy the artist
Mary Helena Clark is an artist working with moving image, sound, sculpture and photography. Exhibitions include the Okayama Art Summit, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; and Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University. Her films have screened at festivals and museums including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Berlinale; New York Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Cinéma du réel, Paris; Viennale; Sundance Film Festival; Institute of Contemporary Art London; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York. She is based in Queens, New York.
Each month in Art Lovers Movie Club, we select artists’ videos and screen them exclusively online at artreview.com. Explore the archive
