THE SUMMIT (2016)
In collaboration with Lauryn Siegel
Three-channel video installation, 10:25
“The Summit” is based on the life of Ethel Smyth, a pioneering opera composer, suffragist, lesbian, and mountain climber who flouted conventions of gender in the early twentieth century. Until recently, Smyth’s “Der Wald” was the only opera composed by a woman to have ever been performed at the Metropolitan Opera (in 1903). Smyth also famously threw a stone at the window of an anti-suffragist politician’s home during a protest, an action that landed her in jail, where she conducted her fellow protesters in her feminist anthem “March of the Women” (which provides the central musical theme for the video). “The Summit” draws from both Smyth’s biography and the Greek myth of Sisyphus, which it places in direct parallel to the uphill battle faced by modern-day queer, feminist, and transgender activists. “The Summit” invokes a long history of marginalized lives to suggest how we might reimagine and ultimately embrace the futility of the never-accomplished task.
"The Summit" was made as a site-specific installation at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in conjunction with Liz Collins' exhibition Energy Field.
