Helen Mirra Videoworks: Volume 1

The image comes up suddenly and then continues unwavering: a young person (Mirra) dressed in a black watchcap and pea coat stands at the edge of a large body of water and sings a sea shanty, occasionally flinching to emphasize certain lyrics or fend off the steady drizzle of rain. The frame is broken up into simple shapes—sea, sky, hat, face, coat—and the longer Mirra sings, the more rain collects on the lens of the camera—threatening to obliterate the subject into the background of sea and sky. Mirra’s ballad maintains the same implicit social critique [as Cindy Sherman’s or Yasumasa Morimura]: that respecting conventional gender codes means a safe but always repressed social role, devoid of any overt expressions of sexuality. The larger irony of Mirra’s piece, however, questions such compliant behavior, since mixing up roles and gender codes reveals that none is more viable or mythical than any other.

—Joe Scanlan

This title is also available on Helen Mirra Videoworks: Volume 1.

"'I am nice. I... am nice. I am... nice," repeats the narrator, in this personal and highly poetic exploration of the construction of self. Mirra favors repetition as the device for reconstructing the stage of development when a child learns its name. Like a bedtime story, the narrator unfolds the tale of a child who identifies herself as a bear. The story becomes increasingly complex as it moves from one voice to two, in which bear and child gradually become distinct entities and the haiku poetry of the child’s identification, 'I, Bear,' is ultimately forsaken for the name Helen. I, Bear is filled with longing for a moment when, as undifferentiated child subjects, we could have identified ourselves as anything, including the most misunderstood of animals."

— Hamza Walker, Persona (Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 1996)

This title is also available on Helen Mirra Videoworks: Volume 1.

Taking its title from a poem by Paul Celan (translated as “sleeping den”), this montage is the result of a script that reconfigures over two hundred lines of English subtitles, lifted from films ranging from Battleship Potemkin and Persona, to The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. The disconcerting soliloquy on love and insomnolence is deliberately attempted in the original French, German, Russian, Italian, and Swedish.

This title is also available on Helen Mirra Videoworks: Volume 1.

Made from silent black and white tube camera footage of the artist taken by her father in the early 70s, this series of loops—through the examination of particular moments and gestures— is evocative for what it reveals and conceals about their relationship.

This title is also available on Helen Mirra Videoworks: Volume 1.