Writing History With Lightning
2015-16, HD video video with sound, 10:00Text from All that is solid melts into air, catalog essay by David Hartt:
When it opened in 1915, the Parkway Theatre in Baltimore was opulent in character, it had a grand tearoom and a marble lobby decorated in the Beaux-arts style with chandeliers modeled on those of Versailles. Later, the theatre would host D.W Griffith’s controversial 1915 silent feature film Birth of a Nation...
...The Parkway Theatre, now derelict, is located at the intersection of North Avenue and N. Charles Street which saw protests following the death in April of 2015 of Freddie Gray, an African-American man fatally injured while in Baltimore police custody.
Created on the centennial anniversary of both the film and theatre, Writing History With Lightning, is a single channel video work by the artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib. Produced by selecting and altering various scenes from D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, Hironaka and Suib projected the looped sequences onto the walls of the Parkway Theatre and captured the spectral images with a high-definition camera. Ten minutes in length, the resulting work recasts the conflicted legacies of both the original film and the architectural space – a critical accounting of ideological and spatial obsolescence.
>> FILM EXCERPT (content advisory: includes imagery from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation)
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