The Box Theory by Owen Land
Video transferred to DVD, sound, 15'36'', 1984
In the text, Land O' Lakes, Land O' Snakes, Mike Kelley confesses his early sexual arousal by the kneeling Indian girl figured on the Land O' Lakes butter box. The children's game of folding the printed image on the butter box, revealing what looks like the girl's breasts, triggers a latent eroticism, making the candid Native American into an almighty evil priestess.
In The Box Theory, Owen Land, the uncanny American structuralist, king of the absurd and a religious addict, recreates the image of the Indian girl, holding the butter box with the image of herself, to produce an ad-eternal video zoom. This operation generates a vertiginous and hypnotic mise-en-abyme centered on the female body. This moving mantra raises the figure of the girl to the status of medieval icon – Our Lady of the O – a fertility goddess from the prodigious and polysemic land Of Land.
"An infant hymn for fertility's hum."
Alexandre Estrela
Saturday july 19, 10.30pm
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