Dig out your pointy witch hats and pumpkin baskets from the back of the closet because Halloween is coming early in this week’s Throwback Thursday! In October 2011, New York-based artist Sue de Beer installed an interactive haunted house in the 14th Street Passage. But rather than host the usual cast of bloodied zombies and chainsaw-carrying ghouls, de Beer’s structure – constructed of smoke-colored mirrors with a bright white antechamber – was entirely empty. The ‘haunted’ feeling was induced by sound, rather than sight. In this work, de Beer employed infrasound, audio tones below the threshold of human hearing, that have been cited as the cause of strange sensations people feel in spaces thought to be haunted – a sense of presence, a dizzy feeling, or an inexplicable smell. Inspired by this concept, de Beer’s Haunt Room takes center stage in this week’s #TBT.
Characterized as an aesthetic interlocutor between angst-ridden teens and the occult, de Beer explores supernatural-obsessed sub-cultures throughout her oeuvre. De Beer’s practice first took root through video installations and environments that explored the paranormal, such as her 2006/2007 horror film set in Puritan New England entitled “The Quickening.” Her larger two-screen video installation, titled “The Ghosts,” debuted at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011 and continued in the vein of the mystical with a hollow-cheeked hypnotist as the protagonist.
In her early years, de Beer was interestingly identified among the post-9/11 practitioners of a death-haunted, neo-Gothic strain of contemporary art – including artists such as David Altmejd. Yet, de Beer’s work is more nuanced than this label, adopting the theme of the supernatural as a wrenching examination of memory and the ways it shapes identity. More specifically, de Beer’s works investigate our turn to the supernatural in times of loss and longing to help us remember or explain events beyond our control. De Beer explained that she views this struggle between memory and reality as an apt metaphor for the artistic process itself.
Haunt Room existed as a more abstract manifestation of de Beer’s interest in the supernatural. Unlike her video works which involved graphic depictions of ghosts and supernatural occurrences, the narrative was left to High Line visitors to interpret and experience.
- Kat Widing
Photos: (1) Photo by Austin Kennedy, Courtesy of Friends of the High Line; (2) Photo courtesy of Friends of the High Line; (3) Sue de Beer, Installation view of "the Ghosts” at the Park Avenue Armory, 2-channel video projection, carpet, silver bean bags, running time approx. 30 minutes, photo courtesy of the artist.
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