Plural Melts

About

»The Story of Joan of Arc part 2«, performed by Beatrice Loft Schulz and Andrew Hardwidge, is a set of five variations on an original performance, »The Story of Joan of Arc«, a pseudo historical account channelling the well known story of the teenage girl martyr through a vocabulary of popular culture and the conflicting biographies of the writer, her friends, and their heroes.

»Femme Fabrications« is an installation made from research on Jean Wilkinson’s 1977 book Flower Fabrications alongside research into the American artist Joseph Cornell’s source materials held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s archives.
A series of textile works encased in silk lined boxes trace Noonan-Ganley’s step-by-step construction of a rose from organdie. The floral emblem of the white rose (dried), death is preferable to a loss of innocence, becomes a filter, which Noonan-Ganley uses to denominate and consider a number of possible recipients for the rose. Joseph Cornell himself, Joyce Hunter - a Manhattan waitress who courted Cornell, Fanny Cerrito - a Romantic ballerina from the 19th entury, Marilyn Monroe and an anonymous acrobat all take their turn as possible recipients. In the case of Cornell, audio recordings, which ruminate on how his sexuality pertain to the criteria of the rose are edited together with home-camcorder video footage of the house that Cornell lived in for most of his life - the house he made the entirety of his artworks within.