2021 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow: Mara Duvra

This is the third in a series of articles profiling the seven distinguished artists chosen as 2021 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2021 cohort includes David Bowen, Mara Duvra, Ben Moren, Rotem Tamir, Dyani White Hawk, and Dream The Combine (Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers).

As their two-year fellowship comes to a close, five of the artists will be participating in an upcoming Discussion Series as well:

• Jasmine Wahi in conversation with Rotem Tamir, David Bowen, and Mara Duvra on Thursday, April 6, 6:30 pm at Mia. 
• Gregory Volk in conversation with Ben Moren and Dyani White Hawk on Thursday, April 20, 6:30 pm at Mia. 

 

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Photo by Rik Sferra

 

Immersion is very much in fashion at the moment, especially in the burgeoning industry of art “experiences.” Projections, mirror rooms, and sculpted, maximalist environments all promise us some escape from the humdrum, from the everyday — as though existing in these bodies on this planet is not immersive enough. Perhaps that’s the problem; I suppose the actual sensorial and emotional overload of our lives is, in part, what we’re running from whenever we shell out for a spectacle or strap on a headset. Everything from overpriced warehouse light-shows to the phones under our noses offer, if not reprieve, at least distraction from this waking life in the natural world.

Ironic, since the word immersion itself is rooted in a physical experience, from the Latin meaning “to plunge or dip into,” typically in reference to water. Perhaps that is part of the immersive experiences’ success — that they tap into something fundamental and deep-seated: the rituals of baptism and bathing, the fears of drowning or being swept away. All in all, they service a desire to feel small, to stand in the presence of an experience so vivid you feel you could be swallowed whole.

In comparison to these fantastical installations, Mara Duvra takes a decidedly more restrained approach, though she, too, is interested in what it means to be immersed. Art galleries have always been places apart from our workaday lives – rooms with a thousand views onto other worlds and other ways of seeing. Duvra’s sparse, considered installations present windows into her own way of thinking through a combination of her photography and the passages and poetry of authors she has been reading. Images of Black women wading into calm waters or bathing in bedroom sunlight are paired with verses from Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Dawn Lundy Martin, among others. It’s as though Duvra is passing light through the prism of Black thought and Black experience, scattering snippets of verse and fragments of landscape onto the walls. Far from the manic, visceral hyperbole of most “immersive” art, she instead slips us calmly into a space of contemplation.

“I wanted to be able to use the image of a Black woman in a way that was soft and tender and didn't have to stand for anything political,” Duvra explains. “Actually, I don't even know if political is the right word. I feel like there's a lot of use of Black people in art where it couldn't be something that was universally felt, like having an interior space or having thoughts and desires that exist outside of people's perception of you. I want to capture what it is like in moments of stillness.”

These installations have formed a larger body of work titled Tending: Meditations on Interiority and Blackness. At the heart of this work are several series of emotionally vulnerable portraits of Black women. In one series, Duvra points her camera at a nude woman standing against a white wall, each image cropped in on her neck, her hand, or her torso, only giving us a piece of the full picture. There is a sense of personal rapture or reflection in the way the woman arches back her head, forming a landscape of skin, or holds one hand to her heart and leaves the other upturned as though asking a question. Paired with these images is a text from Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole: “I feel myself in all places… the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me.”

 

Images from the 2018/2019 Jerome Fellowship Exhibition.

 

Another photo series finds Black women in their bedrooms, wrapped in white sheets or lounging contemplatively on their beds. There is a sense of a narrative interrupted, as though these are individual frames from a larger film, occasionally voyeuristic and deeply intimate. As with her images of water, the bedsheets and cushions also occupy Duvra’s attention, warranting their own moments on the wall, rumpled and warm from a body recently risen. In the installation, these images hover unframed in one long horizontal row, as though culled straight from a film reel, interspersed with the white space of the gallery wall. Nearby, a table and chairs invite the viewer to sit and read the accompanying texts that have inspired and informed the work. “Something softens me,” begins a poem by Aisha Sasha John. “Softens my desire / Something helps me breathe / Something spills out of my pores as light / Is like hope blanketing me”.

“I’m thinking about all the ways that Black women exist in the world as these metaphors for these really big ideas: that they're strong, they have all the info, there's that hashtag ‘listen to Black women,’” Duvra says, “and then they are also invisible. It makes me think of Hortense Spillers, who says I had to get to the space where I marvel at my own thinking and what comes from my own mind.”

Talking to Duvra, you get a sense that she maintains a whole library of these quotations in her head, and if she can’t pull one up from memory, she knows just where to find the right passage on her bookshelf. “I feel like all of the things that I've read become a part of me,” she says.

 

Installation view from the 2018/2019 Jerome Fellowship Exhibition.

 

This practice of gleaning from texts began in school and came into focus during one poetry class in particular. “When I was reading, in general, I would always be highlighting things. And I would have this document of quotes, and I would rewrite passages into notebooks,” she says. “And I thought, I don't know why I'm doing this. It’s probably slowing me down, I need to stop doing it. Until that poetry teacher told me, ‘This is actually an important practice. It's a part of your work. It's part of the way that you're creating art.’” Since then, Duvra has embraced this habit of collecting and curating these texts, letting them not only inform her work but inhabit them. 

Going back at least as far as her 2015 MFA Thesis exhibition at the University of Minnesota, this sense of curation has figured prominently in her installations. She treats each element as an object to be placed in relation to the others, whether those be images, words, furniture, or more esoteric items like bronze slag, odd rocks, and dangling plumb bobs. There is a generosity of space in her installations, arranging these components like stanzas on a page, giving them and us ample room to breathe. And while she has done some curation of other artists’ work, to apply the title of curator to her own practice is to miss something fundamental about her approach as an artist. When she tells me casually, at the end of our conversation, that she spent all of her high school and college years making collages, it suddenly makes sense. This is an artist interested in drawing connections, in gulping down great heaps of source material and producing something simple and refined to reflect those depths. You can hear it in how she describes her practice of reading:

“I like to read several things simultaneously, because I feel like it's the experience of letting those things crash into each other, get confused for each other, and then tease them apart that gets exciting, and makes me think of new visual ideas that emerge from that experience.” In a further nod to the immersive potential of words, Duvra again draws from her mental library and paraphrases the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson: “The experience of reading is the experience of falling away.”

To present the imagery alone, it seems, is not generous enough for Duvra. She feels compelled to cite her sources, to paint a fuller picture of the inspiration behind her work, even as the installations and the passages leave a certain amount of space for our own interpretations. 

 

Work in the solo exhibition And When the Sun Rises, Soo Visual Arts Center, 2019. Text is a line from A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde.

 

In a 2019 solo exhibition at SooVAC, Duvra used as her text the poem A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde. Lorde’s first line is “For those of us who live at the shoreline,” and fittingly, that is the vantage point from which Duvra’s accompanying photographs seem to be taken. Her camera looks down on a beautiful Black woman sinking serenely into placid waters. The photographs themselves mimic the mood of the water: calm, sensual, and unperturbed, with deep brown tones dissolving into murky greens and impassive grays, with the hint of a hazy sunrise reflecting on the surface from an unseen horizon. Who this woman is in her daily life remains irrelevant: Duvra offers her image almost as a coda or a rejoinder perhaps to Lorde’s poem, which addresses “those of us / who were imprinted with fear” and whom “the heavy-footed hoped to silence.” Lorde’s litany, repeated twice in the poem, is a reminder: “We were never meant to survive.”

This highlights the difficulty of presenting Black subjects truly at rest, as removed from the political history of this place. Even the waters into which this woman reclines call to mind the Land of 10,000 Lakes, which has its own deep history of entangling Indigenous people, people of color, and women of color in particular in the systems and strictures of white supremacy. These juxtapositions of image and text illuminate Duvra’s appreciation for that complexity even as she searches for some stillness outside of that history. 

In the 2021 installation unfolding a soft horizon at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the Tending images — a woman in a bedroom, photographed from behind through a mirror — hangs next to thin shelves holding a small stack of books, one of which is open to a page about Sojourner Truth’s early embrace of photography. The abolitionist sits for a portrait, elegant and direct, looking up as though interrupted from the knitting she holds in one hand. Underneath, the caption reads “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” Truth copyrighted her own image and sold it to fund her abolition work, an entrepreneurial innovation that takes on an even more revolutionary tone when you reflect that she knew from personal experience what it was to be bought and sold.

 

Work from unfolding a soft horizon, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2021.

 

Over 150 years later, Duvra pays respect to the inescapable context of American reality but yearns to go deeper. “I do think that Black people can be metaphors for so much more. For me, photographing Black people was a way to create metaphors that went beyond what was expected or what was usual.”

At the moment, though, Duvra finds herself moving away from explicit reference to the body. "How can I create installations that make space for people to experience those words, without having necessarily to use the image of a person at all?" she wonders. "I think of it as like using an image of the landscape to get to a more central idea of something. Even in the direction that I'm headed I want to abstract it more."

In the 2021 installation a holding place at St. Cloud State University, Duvra presents another collection of objects and texts. Four large, portentous images command the most attention: two pairs of identical photos, one of a lake’s still surface, the other an overcast sky. A short stack of books hovers on a wall nearby, and a small wooden desk sits in the middle with a single chair — the only explicit reference to the body, and in this case, specifically that of the viewer. Each of the large photos is paired with its duplicate; one has been captioned with a single quotation, the other left empty, as though we are meant to supply our own. On the desk is a notebook and a prompt in the form of a poem, inviting viewers to write their own entries in answer to the question “What are you holding space for?”

Duvra has transformed the gallery into an office of sorts — a space devoted to thinking, reflecting, and puzzling out the answers to a problem — and one that directly requests audience interaction. When I ask if she expects viewers at any point to pick up the books and read them, she says no, though she’s open to that happening. “I think the books are acting primarily sculpturally,” she explains. “I like the idea of sharing the things that influenced me. I want that to be very transparent, to be tangibly part of the work.”

 

Installation views of a holding place, St Cloud State University, 2021.

 

The oversized images of water and sky offer as little information as possible. Technically, you could consider these landscapes, though she sees them more as an exciting avenue for abstraction, a visual prompt to invite stillness, reflection, and engagement with the texts and the task at hand. As with all of Duvra’s photography, the colors are sumptuous and moody, even as all we get is a subtle gradient from black up to a dull, steel-blue lavender. You might not even recognize the one pair as a water’s surface at first, but that is precisely what you are looking at, offering no other information about location, temperature, depth, or distance. 

A connection suddenly occurs: between the surface of the water, the skin of a body, and the cover of a book. Each of them sit on top — visible, accessible, and connected to what lies within but ultimately able only to hint at the depths they contain. Without a human character to focus on, we are left with the images, the words, and the feelings they dredge up in each of us, even more personal than before. We each have our own answers to the artist's question and our own reactions to the artist's work. Memories of grief and rest and menace; histories of pain and death and freedom; reflections of our size and our place in this world, in this moment, perhaps even in this gallery. Artwork is not the catalyst, it's the reminder: we're already immersed, if we'd only look around. ◼︎

 

Detail of work in a holding place, St Cloud State University, 2021. Text is a quotation from Dawn Lundy Martin's essay "Disembodied States: THE BODY GRIEVES IN ITS HEART CHEST."

 

To see more of Mara Duvra's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @mara.duvra.

For other dives into immersive art, check out Russ White's write-ups on The Immersive Van Gogh and Quantum Mirror.