A Modern(ist) Love Story, 2014, 4:37

Auto-Portrait, 2015, 2:09

Some Music, 2016, 2:22

The Muse Trilogy investigate cultural definitions of “the muse” that perpetuate not only gendered stereotypes but obsequious notions of artistic enterprise. Incorporating a series of ambiguous narratives and gestures, these works seek to disclose the irretrievable biographies of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, Jeanne Hébuterne, and Musa McKim. (A fourth piece entitled Mnemosyne uses Edouard Manet’s notorious model Victorine Meurent as its subject, an addendum to the muse theme.)

This series began as a collaboration with Virginia-based writer, LeeAnn Thomas, whose prose poem “Madame Cézanne’s smile, a modern love story” was used as the basis for Devine’s performative interpretation, A Modern(ist) Love Story. This video-performance, completed in 2014, is also based on what little is known of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, wife of painter Paul Cézanne. An ambiguous set of actions in a limited space animates the seated Hortense, who defiantly chops the apples reminiscent of her husband’s still lifes, tears a book symbolic of the patriarchal literature that disavowed her, and ultimately moves in a chair to which she was so often tethered in his portraits of her.

This video became the basis for further research on other such women, lost to history and subsumed under the greatness of the men they loved and aided. The subject of Autoportrait is Jeanne Hébuterne, the companion of Amedeo Modigliani. Like the previous video, this piece was shot in an interior space. Some Music, explored the life of Musa McKim, wife of American painter Philip Guston, and was shot both in studio and outdoors. For both of these works, Devine interviewed and collaborated with leading art history scholars and surviving family to glean appropriate imagery. Along with A Modern(ist) Love Story, these works can be shown on monitors as a trilogy.

The agency of the female subject in these video-performances, elusive and enigmatic, is intended to subvert patriarchal readings that were once the basis of modern art historical analysis. Still, these works also acknowledge and rely upon the cultural assumptions regarding the relationship between male artist and “muse,” disarming the gendered roles and stereotypes we more broadly take for granted.

video performance, Epic Red film, 4:29

To read the interview with Women Cinemakers, click here.

Mnemosyne is the epilogue to the muse trilogy that examined Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, Jeanne Hebutérne, and Musa McKim.  Though Mnemosyne's focus is Victorine Meurent, it is named for the Greek goddess of memory, who was also the mother of the nine muses. Often depicted holding the lantern or light of memory, the broken chandelier alludes to moving away from the past, while an obvious homage is made to Meurent with the reference to the iconic painting for which she sat, Luncheon on the Grass. If Mnemosyne alludes to the muse's ability to call upon memory as an important element of creativity, Meurent is the ultimate example of the woman reduced to static image, her own biography completely lost. The thread of the narrative belongs to Mnemosyne, Meurent, and the artist as muse to herself simultaneously. 

Victorine Meurent is likely the most famous nude in the history of Western painting.  Although she and Edouard Manet are not known to have been intimate, she appears as the model for nine of his paintings during a pivotal shift in his artistic direction. Born to a working class family in one of the poorest areas of Paris, Meurent was a street musician and fortunate to acquire work modeling for artists when becoming a courtesan would have been the highest station she could have aspired.  Since she was not Manet’s mistress, and her position in his paintings went beyond portraiture to a central figure in his new, innovative approach to realist scenes, it is in theory as easy to imagine Meurent and Manet as inventive collaborators. The bourgeois Manet was captivated by the independent, street smart eighteen-year-old, and she came to represent the gritty realism of Paris that he was attempting to capture.  

For thirteen years, Meurent was the model to some of Manet’s greatest works, which are also among the most important turning points in Modern art.  But little is known about Meurent after about 1890. There is record of the exhibition of her own paintings in the annual salons, but only one – a small portrait – survives. Although her image is iconic, it is likely that the most famous nude died in poverty.  The “muse” to Manet’s intellect, she did not fall prey to the emotional prettification of a beloved subject; although little is known about her, she was ironically the source for the process of visualizing and celebrating the real over the ideal. 

video installation (digital SLR, 2:35; encaustic over lace on panel on astroturf)

Communion (Eng., noun)

. the service of Christian worship - the Sacrament of Eucharist in Catholicism - at which bread and wine are consecrated and shared

. the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a mental or spiritual level

In May of 1971, 49 women took a train from Belfast, loaded with as many condoms as they could purchase, and were arrested on the platform in Dublin. Contraception was still illegal in the Republic women had helped to liberate, although 240 women actively fought 100 years ago in the Easter Rising of 1916. Like many revolutionary societies, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, women fought for the cause of nationality only to be disenfranchised under the religious patriarchy of the new regime.  When condoms were illegal contraband from British occupied Northern Ireland, the Contraception Train was a watershed act of defiance by the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement.

From the Magdalene Laundries to the marriage bar to the primacy of women as bearer of children, the Catholic Church in Ireland has a long stronghold over women’s autonomy over their own bodies. And although women were kept to the home, poor daughters supported their families as domestic servants and in the needlepoint, weaving, and lace-making industries, only to receive little or nothing in family inheritance.

Inghinidhe na hÉireann, or Daughters of Ireland, references both the first group of women who ran guns for the Easter Rising as well as the continued struggle for equal rights. It is inscribed on a panel of encaustic over lace, indicating the toil of women’s labor; laid on a flat plane of grass, the installation mimics the memorial at Arbor Hill Prison that marks the execution site of the Rising leaders.

The sound element is a keening, the traditional wailing cry that was a custom among women in the Irish countryside.  Rooted in early Celtic culture as part of a long, celebratory wake for the dead, the tradition was banned by the church and is largely a lost practice today.  The wafer and the condom, significantly similar in size, color, and shape, both denote an intimate and sensual experience; a communion where the sacred and profane contradictions of the church wield control over women’s bodies. 

This work was commissioned for a 100 year commemorative exhibition of the Easter Rising at the Hillyer Arts Space in DC. 

performance, 3 hours

Ritual (Eng., noun)

a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered space designed to influence forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests.

There is a near liminal connection between religious ritual and performance art, and a connection between the roles of shaman and artist in transformative experience.  Performance revels in contradictions and ambiguity, so that audiences may glean their own interpretations and potentials for transformation. Whereas rituals tend to be precise, their outcomes can be just as enigmatic. 

The performance stretches across three hours, broken into three twenty-minute segments that total nine ritualistic acts:  Making, Repenting, Cleansing.  The three mounds of sugar, salt, and flour reference the biblical symbolism of kindness, friendship, and truth respectively.  There are twenty different instructions for the audience; each one is repeated three times.

The ambiguous instructions requested from the audience implicate participants in the sustainment of community rituals, and instruct them to both enact and imagine new possibilities for spiritual agency. Those performed by the artist demystify the Eucharist wafer, believed to transubstantiate into the body of Jesus Christ; reference religious supplications and spiritual posturings toward repentance and enlightenment across Eastern and Western practices; and finally subsume the female body beneath the material and ritualistic culture that represses it – anointing (oil), defiling (wine), and purifying (water).  The fluids and the residual flour conjoin the female body with the miraculous and sensuous act of Communion, as well as its domination and repression within the Catholic Church.

The emphasis on the number “3” in the choreography and the installation itself insists upon a Christian recognition of the trinity.  However, the artist pays homage to systems such as Numerology and Astrology that were, like philosophy, suppressed when the structure of the Church was determined at the Nicene Council in the fourth century. Various approaches to Numerology and Astrology predated Christianity by centuries, but were admonished because they contradicted the sovereignty of God in the determination of human fate.  Even today, they are widely viewed as illegitimate systems compared to the accepted practices of patriarchal religions.

This work uses the Catholic sacrament of Eucharist itself as a metaphor for the centrality of patriarchal systems in the enforcement of practices and beliefs we do not question and thereby religions have, for centuries, superseded and instilled our most ingrained attitudes about women’s agency for their own bodies.

As an extension of Communion, this live performance took place five months later at the Bennett Park Art Atrium in Arlington, VA.

Shown Feb - April 2017  in the exhibition "Women Now," commemorating the centennial anniversary of the incarceration of suffragettes at the original site of the prison, now the Workhouse Arts Center.  An exhibition of 11 women artists, "Women Now" also featured Mickalene Thomas, Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Bartlett.  

The work was featured again in "Home + Discordance = US" at NYU, Washington DC in Sept/Oct, 2017.

In 1913, the suffragettes staged their first march on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson's election.  From that point and through their arrests in 1917, the use of banners as material objects was at the heart of their campaigns and picketing of the White House. It was as much their texts that promulgated their arrests.  Noting the parallels of their use of banners, Devine filmed a group of artists making banners on Martin Luther King Day, days before the 2017 Women's March that would take place the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration.

Additional video was taken of the march itself, and the edited footage revealed specific chants of protest.  Anchored between a dual projection, one of scenes from the Women's March and one of the hands of artists making banners, are over 70 banners, many taken from the White House and Trump Hotel on the night of January 21. 

Devine explores the roots of protest, and a demand for voices to be heard.  Excerpts from speeches by Martin Luther King provides the sound for one video, while the chants of the marching crowd fill the other.  The banners of the Suffragettes and the many signs by the protestors, which became an indelible image of the Women's March, provide a parallel for considering the use of text in the advocation for women's rights over the last century.  

Performed for "Women Now" at the Workhouse Arts Center in Feb, 2017 and again in Aug, 2017 at the Pittsburgh Performance Art Festival. 

When the Suffragettes were harassed, grabbed, and spat upon in the Washington March on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration, one of them, Dr. Nellie Mark, stated, “I did not know men could be such fiends.”  This performance investigates the possibilities for apathy or allegiance, enmity or friendship in how women and men relate to one another, and how those relations are culturally influenced.

In this 3-hour durational performance, the artist uses her body as the structure for a kind of “tapestry” for collecting viewer recollections.  An emphasis is placed upon material and text, creativity and language in revolutionary protests, a similar theme in her video installation (Un)Silent Sentinel.  At points in the performance, she sews into the tapestry, a recollection of the embroidered banners that were crucial to both the Suffragettes’ persecution and success.

The theme of language and text is also relational to absolute “truths” that we take for granted, and the roots of gendered spaces in sexuality and society that are ingrained in textual culture.  The artist reads excerpts from modern male writers, from those criticized for obscenity (D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Vladimir Nabakov) to those viewed as allies to feminism (Thomas Hardy, Frederick Douglass, Tom Robbins). Interspersed with news and media voices, contemporary articles in print and online, the artist reflects on the social and cultural texts that undermine and influence attitudes related to gender, however subtle.  A selection of interviews and lectures by leading feminists (Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Chimamanda Adiche) whose writings have influenced the artist provide counterpoint to the effects of misogyny and patriarchy, with an inflection toward intersectional topics in feminism today. 

In media and texts, authorial voices have culturally influenced men in positions of political power today, whose attitudes toward gender in both society and intimate relations have in part been hewn by modernist writers and second wave feminism.  In her role as an educator, the artist also emphasizes authors, novels, and cultural events that a younger generation may not be aware.  In stream of conscious fashion, the fiction of literary forms and the non-fiction of news coalesce and leave the reader/listener grappling with the relationship between text and “truth.”

3-hour durational performance

flour, cornstarch, white chocolate, mints, food color

Commissioned for Art All Night, DC, 2017

Standing out on the façade of the old Wonder Bread Factory are white crosses. In the late nineteenth century, it was established as the Dorsch’s White Cross Bakery.  Not an original part of the architecture, the white crosses were intended to relieve fears that their food products may not be safe after the controversy of Upton Sinclair's 1906 book, The Jungle.

Sinclair intentionally portrayed the horrors of harsh working conditions that particularly exploited the lives of immigrant workers. His intention was to advance the cause of Socialism and labor reform in the U.S.  What remained on the minds of the novel’s readers, however, were rampant  unsanitary conditions in the meat packing / food processing industry. 

The interconnectivity of Capitalism, the commercial food industry, and food poverty have extended with new complexities into the twentieth century.   Wonderwerk for Washington DC by Washington DC provides space to consider collective responsibility, shared labor, and the role of the artist in reimagining and recreating balances of power.

+This piece is dedicated to Yoko Ono, and the work she has given to DC and the world

3-hour durational performance with objects, video projection. Beyond the Obvious, Otis Street Art Projects, Mt. Rainier MD

2-hour performance with objects. VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK “Co-Creation Live Factory – Prologue 1”, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 14-16 December 2017.  all photos (c) Alexander Harbaugh and Lorenza Cini

Instructions for Participation

Choose an object located on the shelves.  Do so intuitively – the first thing that gravitates you.

Statement

The Western tradition of philosophy is largely based on logical, cause-and-effect sequences.  In his theory of synchronicity, Carl Jung suggested that meaningful events are no less legitimate just because they cannot be explained by causality.  These “coincidences” may, in fact, not be coincidences, but like quantum physics have cause-and-effect links that are simply beyond our capacity of knowing.

“I can remember things before they happen” refers to one of Jung’s favorite anecdotes to synchronicity, a conversation between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the queen suggests that memory can work both ways:  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”  Between the short stories of Paul Auster, accounting real life coincidences, and the novels of Tom Robbins, where objects are attributed properties that allow them movement beyond our normal capacities of observation, Devine gleans the possibility that objects, when properly contained, will become the basis for sensuous communication.

The selected objects for the work's initial performance were based on inquiries into representations of “sacred and personal” with sixteen women. In Venice, the objects were accumulated from other artists during the performance week.  Devine presupposes the totemic properties of objects as a basis for an exploration of synchronicity with the viewer.  While this kind of object communication is obviously an aesthetic concept in visual art, Devine hinges it within the everyday, with her own body as the exposed medium.  Testing the viewer’s comfort with these modes of communication – intimate and vulnerable, irrational and spiritual – the artist anticipates that viewers will find as much reassurance in coincidences with meaning than causal reality without it. 

VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK “Co-Creation Live Factory – Prologue 1”, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 14-16 December 2017.  all photos (c) Lorenza Cini

Come Home was a collaborative work, a culmination of actions and experiences among participating artists in the Venice Performance Art Week and led by VestAndPage.   

The text of the performance, written by VestAndPage, was accumulated and excerpted from aesthetic conversations and critiques throughout the week. 

I am new
to this experience of
being
inside myself
controlled by others
I am vulnerable yet I am safe I am weak yet I am strong

I know my past, but I can’t see my future. The future is in my back
my past is in my front –
So I harbor the tension in my back and expose it to you,
just to cover it again, to externalize, contain.

I am on the thin line
between scaring and relieving trauma – sane or insane.

I am the organic Opus Dei. Mortified. I am an altar.
I don’t stop you. I need time.

We’re cutting women up turning them into objects. Post-traumatic cellular genetics.

I am the crack.
I open up,
so the water can pass.
These stones are parts of the scars
of the crevasses of the ancestral territory. I am nothing.

I am who I am
I carry some things with me without ‘being’ them I am everything
I am in a body that is my body
I was thin tall beautiful, now I am old

I am not ’we’
I am I
I am not speaking out anybody else’s truth
I am a body that is by nature radical
Digging to the roots
I am an entry point
As my story is your story
And I am many
I am not just one body
And still
When you confront yourself with me – is it still universal?

Would you stand with me, and hold my hand?

In the ambience of life we become sore.

You’re damned if you do
and you’re damned if you don’t. To not see
and expect to be seen...

There’s so much we don’t know but we try to play normal. When does it get real?
(That’s my only issue with art.)

Cracks have opened so water flows life is a minefield
where we go beyond
the simple action to honor the issue

And what do we want to create from here? We are standing.
We are never on solid ground.
We continue.

All we have to do is a simple act.

None before me had the chance to live their desires.

And all of the knowledge that is in the space is what we are
together.
No one shall be afraid of their truth.

We are projecting onto the image we are in to. And yet,
I don’t believe
in universality, because there is always culture.

And when we can name it, we can look at it.
And when we’re ready,
we can throw it away.

We choose our labels. And we throw them away when we need to.

I want to understand otherness. It is so difficult
to be
different.

Bodies need to be
unpacked.
The other – the special one – could be the hyper-physics – the bridge.

I can.
Or maybe not. 

9-hour durational performance, sound & video installation

for the centennial of the Torpedo Factory building

The site of the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria has a long and complex story. This performance reflects on Alexandria’s intersecting histories of slavery and the manufacturing of weapons, both of which are arguably unified by the objectives of capitalism.

During the Civil War, thousands of slaves made their way to Union-occupied Alexandria for sanctuary. To avoid violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and to safe keep against their concern that slaves would be used militarily against them, the Union Army held them as “contraband.” This defined these refugees as a supply gained through war and therefore rightful to withhold from use, while also emphasizing their status as property.

In 1918, along the same banks of the Potomac River where the escaped slaves had camped in shanty towns riddled with disease, the Torpedo Factory was built to sell armaments to the allies fighting in World War I. The torpedoes were designed to span a range of 4500 yards. It is estimated that 10,000 torpedoes were manufactured, for both World Wars, and sunk an estimated 1500 ships.

The lives lost as a result of slavery, and those who were killed at sea by the torpedoes made here, are inestimable and ultimately the casualties of man’s insatiable desire for dominance and resources. To mark a memorium, for a total of 4500 yards the artist drags a crate of rock and detritus -- suggestive of the scuttled ships and “fill in” (wooden crates filled with debris) that make the framework of banked out land where the factory sits.

The sound element includes the seismic recordings from submarines, in sync with projections of historic photos from Alexandria’s public archives. The artist’s performance co-recognizes the relationship between war and capitalism and, in its simplicity and duration, pays tribute to their casualties and celebrates the transformation of the factory into a center for art in 1970.

In my research for Mnemosyne (2016), I became more interested in the essential condition of memory to creativity.

Moving forward with this realization, I began a collaboration with neuroscientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) who research short and long-term memory via the neurofunctions of the insect branin. These functions rely on a visceral connection to their environments.

The first photos were made in June 2019 beginning in Australia, where a series of devastating wildfires would later take place. More photos were made on the east and west coasts of the United States and future images will be made in other countries. The images are performance-stills of interactions with these unique environments. They surround the Mnemonic (Sound) System, a sound chair emitting recordings of wildlife Devine collected in these environments - from the Blue Mountains outside Sydney and later California and Virginia. The effect is a sensory installation that bridges the fascinating and elusive processes of memory with an urgent narrative to our fading ecosystems.

The final installation will include mixed-media prints/drawings onto large sheets of handmade paper that were produced at Reading Road Studio in July 2020. Images will record neuron structures and the nomenclature affected by various population loss. These ongoing performative interventions recorded in photography and sound, combined with printmaking and installation, seek to activate memory as a process connected to the sensory overlays stimulated by unique environments upon which we are collectively dependent with other species.

+++++++++

Notes from an artist’s process

While conducting research for a piece I would perform in the Venice Performance Art Week, I found a book about the amount of Venetian art that had been lost to wars and floods over the centuries. From it, a quote stood out: “There is so little left in the world, but the so little that had been left was so much.” I felt it also applies to what we are losing as a result of climate. What can we retain in our memories when important things are disappearing….

What I ended up doing for my solo piece in Venice was an earlier work “I can remember things before they happen.” Another quote, this time from Alice in Wonderland, that begins with “It’s a poor kind of memory that only works backward.”

Issues of what and how we remember have been floating in my head since I completed Mnemosyne, when I thought I was only caught up in the feminist concerns of deconstructing the “muse.” I discovered that the artistic process has been anchored to memory since the Greeks. Therefore, currency of the term ‘memory’ repeated over and over again by artists until it loses real meaning, actually has some merit beyond any mythos of creativity.

After my collaboration with scientists, I now understand that memory works forward rather than back. Sight, touch, sound, and especially scent are the tools of memory. They provide a pathway forward to saving species under threat, and help us faintly hold on to what will inevitably be lost.

virtual performance for International Online Performance Art Festival, 26 Nov 2020

video format for VisArts, Maryland, Dec 2020

“Not every artist is a chess player, but every chess player is an artist.”

--Marcel Duchamp

“Play Chess alone and you will always win.”

--Anonymous

Splitting her time between Cologne and Washington, DC, Devine was separated from her German partner for over six months of the Covid pandemic. In many ways, this historic moment has forced the world into a reconsideration of confinement, movement, travel, borders, and the tensions of our relationship with self and responsibility toward others.

Now reunited with her partner, from the city center of Cologne Devine’s piece is performed in their Souterrain Wohnung (below-ground apartment) during Germany’s second lockdown. Although the apartment was originally a nineteenth-century wine cellar, Devine cannot help but think of its possible use as a Luftschutzbunker (air raid shelter) during World War II when many of the city’s citizens would have used such spaces for safety. In contrast to single nights of intense terror during a war, Devine emphasizes its present purpose as a long-term place of shelter during a pandemic to amplify the space’s potential for the solitary activities of contemplation, reflection, meditation, imagination, and even joy.

Devine’s practice is informed by parallels between past and present. Her performances are installation-based and site-specific, designed from the histories of the locations where she performs. Here, the double barrel-vaulted space of the apartment recalls the long history of Cologne, dated to the Romans, and the white walls and furniture lend it an ascetic monasticism, even while recalling the lounging women-as-objects of art historical painting. Her attire blends her into the space but her “crown” references the city’s vibrant tradition of Karneval, the Queen persona in the Chess game and, of course, the new “luxury leisurewear” of current Covid fashion.

In this performance, Devine positions Chess as the central arrangement for meditation, creativity, and individual attention as a kind of endgame. She makes a homage to the many artists who have celebrated Chess as a superior mental activity, while denoting the game’s emphasis on strategy and social hierarchies by reading from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. In Chess, the move 0-0-0 is known as “castling,” a safe yet active position in the game, and the number has obvious reference to infinity; signaling a metaphoric need to envision the current moment from a broader perspective, one perhaps less combative and more reflective, less individual and more collective.