Maggie Mullin O’Hara - I’m Trying To Tell You

Telfair Museums/Jepson Center - Savannah GA

By Todd Schroeder

Piled in a corner of Maggie Mullin O’Hara’s persuasive and conspicuous exhibition (”I’m Trying To Tell You”) is the sculptural assemblage This Is My Nowhere, a sweep of 13 mismatched television sets from the 1990s-as if a collection of discarded relics, plucked from such places of distinction as living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens, and stored akimbo in an impractical corner of the basement. Talking heads of the artist are split-screen on the TVs, filling the gallery with the sound of a chattering “musique concrete.” O’Hara videotaped herself for a 30-second confessional twice a day-first in the morning and then in the evening-every day for a year (occasionally missing a morning, an evening, or full day).

Her 2-channel video and sound projection This Is Me Crying grew out of the process of making This Is My Nowhere. O’Hara stumbled on the structure when she noticed that she would often cry in her 30-second confessionals. She used her static camera setup, already in place for the confessionals, whenever she felt the urge to cry, the swell and ebb of emotion dictating the duration of the recording. Viewers find themselves running an immersive gauntlet of empathy through the passageway into the main space of the exhibition. From floor to ceiling on opposite walls, 2 looping videos are projected-close-ups of the artist crying, with fluctuating intensity, welling up, calming down, and sometimes apologizing. Notable in the 20-minute loops is O’Hara’s medley of outfits, a vast range of apparel, makeup, and hair style, that help to propel the narrative of what might have caused her to cry. Was she just in from work, was she lying around watching TV, did she just wake up, just get off the phone, just get in from a night on the town?

Maggie Mullin O'Hara, Stills from This Is Me Crying, 2017, archival Inkjet prints. Courtesy of the artist.

Allusions to classic conceptual and performance art abound in O’Hara’s show. She sets in place rules that dictate chance-oriented outcomes, and she appropriates the structure of Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong performance commitments, but the most obvious cry out is to Bas Jan Ader’s seminal public display of emotion I’m too sad to tell you. While Ader is too sad to tell us, O’Hara is willing to try. Clearly inviting the evocation of Ader, she extends his expressionist act into contemplating questions about gender expectations relative to public weeping.

As a contrast to the often-uncompromising structure of classic conceptual art-think of Sol Lewitt’s neat pronouncement in 1967 that “The idea is a machine that makes the work”-the emotional and messy is foregrounded in O’Hara’s work. The structure in This Is My Nowhere is more akin to the conventional model than This Is Me Crying, but she doesn’t sweat the occasional missed morning, evening, or even day. This improvisational flexibility would not have flown with Tehching Hsieh in 1981. One missed hour-let alone one day- would have devastated his Time Clock performance. It’s the crumbling itself in O’Hara’s work that solidifies it.

The show is part of Telfair Museums’ #art912 initiative, a dedicated platform to raise the visibility and promote the vitality of artists residing in Savannah.

(July 28 - November 5, 2017)

Todd Schroeder is an artist and educator based in Savannah GA.

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