While the artists Michael Heizer and James Turrell are out reshaping the nature of the American West, Cat Clifford is out filming herself pretending to be a deer. She clearly has studied and practiced the part. In the middle of brush desert, she delicately lifts a knee, her toes pointed to the ground, and begins to make her way lightly across the video screen, until she stops, turns toward the camera, and stares at it, as if trying to divine its intentions. Not only is she an animal mystified by a machine, she is an artist examining her medium, and a human separating herself, identifying with another species instead of her human viewers. And it's not absurd, it's absorbing. She isn't mimicking a deer so much as trying to become one, while acknowledging the unlikeliness. To do a hop of a certain height, she needs to jump from a stone, so she matter-of-factly lugs the stone forward after each jump. In another scene, she wears a backpack, sneakers, and a skirt as she looks into the distance and leaps out of the frame.
Marvelously, Walk Like a Deer is playing in the elevator at the Henry Art Gallery. The slick silver elevator walls and flat video screen are the perfect foil for Clifford's body-powered, slow-paced, and tacitly feminist treatments of rural and remote environments, whether in videos, drawings, or animations. This summer, they've been scattered everywhere in what adds up to a makeshift almost-survey. Her three videos on the Henry screen are Walk Like a Deer, I Knew This Buck, and Sitting with Tree. She's had large wall installations at Howard House; video in Growing Accustomed at Crawl Space; and her animation is in the survey New American Talent at Arthouse in Austin, Texas.
In person, the Vashon Island–based artist seems a lot like her work: clear-eyed, soft-spoken, innocent but not young. (Surprisingly, she is young—only 30.) In her talk at Crawl Space, she explained that she started as a painter, depicting her apartment over time, for instance, and making plein-air views of backhoes. Pretty quickly she moved into inventing stories and replaying them in drawings, dry points, performances, and audio. She'd sketch up characters and act out their stories. One was an archaeologist, so she'd dig outside where she was living, make prints of the scenes she'd found/made, and repeat the process until the same plate showed generations of scratches. The time tracked on those plates got her thinking about video, and then she really took off.
The first video she made that she liked was of her hand running along the side of a trailer. It was her first time being in the frame, refusing to be physically detached by the lens, and even now, when her whole body is not in the frame, her hand or foot often is (as in the video where she strolls alongside a daddy longlegs). If her use of the camera links her to artists like Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman, she says she is also enacting simple tasks she sets for herself following the example of Richard Serra's "verb lists," his linguistic reminders to start sculptures with actions.
The effort in her painstaking process is not always evident in the videos: She "walked like a deer" for five weeks straight (during a residency in Banner, Montana), but we only see three minutes of footage. By contrast, her labor is made plain in innovative, black-and-white stop-motion animations that capture birds and tractors leaving, as they pass along the screen, trails of mowed-down paper in their wakes. In a twist on the South African artist William Kentridge's erased animations, Clifford draws the moving object in one position on thick paper, films the image, then cuts out the object and draws it in its next moment, over and over again. By pairing the final animation with the drawings for the wall installation For the Morning You Should Stay Here, Clifford treated all parts of her process equally, but ultimately her moving works are her most powerful, the ones that return to time, their original medium.
What knits together her exploration of mediums, her evocative narrative sensibility, and her meditative patience and lifts it all to the level of continuously beguiling art is her devoted attention to what's around her. In I Knew This Buck, the artist runs her hand over a dead buck she came upon in the street in Montana, a buck she had been watching for weeks, and her reactions to its death are reflected in the movements of her hand, captured by her camera at the same moment she experiences them—sorrow, love, morbid curiosity, revulsion. Her 2005 animation It Took Him Twice as Long to Walk His Fence Line; He Wrote Poems is based on an elderly man Clifford heard about from a friend, who spent whole days mowing the yard because whenever he saw something beautiful, he'd have to stop and write poetry. It is a portrait of the artist.
jgraves@thestranger.com
