Dana Hoey’s latest video work, Pilgrim, Puritan, Whore, is a masterpiece, created in only a few weeks specifically for the “MATRYOSHKAS” exhibition at Analix Forever in Geneva, Switzerland from 12 March to April 26, 2021. This exhibit brings together two women whose work is about imprisonment: Rachel Labastie and Laure Tixier. Rachel Labastie’s work is about the imprisonment of women, while Laure Tixier’s is about the imprisonment of children and of bodies. The exhibition is accompanied by a video program including Janet Biggs, Dana Hoey, Randa Maddah, Joanna Malinowska, Rachel Labastie, Guendalina Salini and Laure Tixier.
By “Matryoshkas”, do we mean Russian dolls? Not only. “Matryoshkas” in this exhibition, refers to all the women we carry within us: the women of our past, our ancestors, their lives, their confinements, their jails, trapping us in turn into all that they have lived. We are locked inside their past. But paradoxically, all these “Matryoshkas” within us also represent opportunities, all of our possible identities, all we can become. These “Matryoshkas” thus are to be seen as an oxymoron between imprisonment and freedom to choose.
Dana Hoey in her videos Pilgrim, Puritan, Whore, immediately attributes a triple identity to the woman she portrays, who is none other than the artist herself. First, a woman in an Amish dress transports blocks of stone from meadow to snow. The Amish community is a Christian community of former European Anabaptists, founded in 1693, living henceforth mainly in Pennsylvania, and following a full-fledged lifestyle, refusing any modernity. Second, a young girl from the same community carries wood as instructed by a young man, then the roles are reversed. Third, the Amish woman gradually takes off her clothes, without undressing, until she appears in a T-shirt that reads “Hysterical Female“.
Then we find her, sitting quietly in the corner of the fireplace, as she should, knitting a skein of new wool without needles. At dawn, amid the cries and songs of the animals saluting the sun, she is going to throw the ashes in the snow.
Pilgrim, Puritan, Whore is a video of great simplicity, whose images are of astonishing beauty. Nothing is explained, Dana Hoey is not in a didactic mode; everything is suggested. The Amish woman is a perfect representation of the confinements that we allow to be imposed upon us, of the chains handed from generation to generation, never thrown away. When the whore sheds her Amish clothes, there is a hint of a revolt against the status quo, even though the woman’s face remains unmoved. She then appears in a new uniform, that of “hysterical female” (an epithet full of contempt with which the good Doctor Freud and many others have globally rigged all the women tempted towards revolution against their dominated state – any kind of refusal of their confinements). But after making a physical attempt to break down the barriers, the woman finds herself again by the hearth, in her age-old place and position. The “hysterical female”, the whore, is tucked again into the puritan’s shell.
Meanwhile, a young Amish girl is carrying firewood, instructed by a young man. But then the roles are reversed: it is now the young man who carries the wood under the supervision of the girl. A sign of hope? The younger generations indeed have the opportunity to change the world, whether Amish or not. They are one of these possibilities that the Matryoshkas carry with them.
Finally, the woman comes out of the house, the ashes from the hearth in a bucket, like the remains of her life as a recluse, and throws them into the wind. With this magical gesture, like a witch’s gesture, the entire forest sings its greeting to the dawn sun. Women, even if socially locked up, keep within themselves the possibility to interact with a different world, an asocial one, or one with different social rules: the world of earth, nature, animals, cycles. But while dawn could have meant yet another possible sign of rebirth, the woman turns back to her house, bucket empty and head bowed.
The past is not over yet.
Pilgrim, Puritan, Whore, 2021, cell phone video, in camera sound, 9 minutes 53 secs, ed. unique with 2 APs.