As a Wife Has a Cow

Description:

Cornelia Wyngaarden’s video installation As a Wife Has a Cow presented a country western landscape reframed through a queer and feminist lens.   

Borrowing its title from Gertrude Stein’s 1926 poetry collection A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story, the work pays homage to Stein’s restructuring of language in her literary portraiture. In place of the iconic Marlboro Man figure, Wyngaarden casts a butch femme ranch-hand who recounts stories of rural life.  Sensational campfire tales give way to grounded, mundane accounts that challenge conventional myths of masculinity and frontier heroism. In this subversion, Wyngaarden emphasizes the ways in which landscape is indifferent to gender and stereotyping. 

The installation comprised six monitors positioned on hay bales arranged in a circle at the centre of the gallery. The monitors faced inward, so that viewers could never see all the screens at once. This fractured view simulated the feeling of being in a landscape, where vision is never contained to a single plane. At the same time, it presented a critique of the media’s inability to deliver full, panoramic representations of humanity and lived experience.

As a Wife Has a Cow was presented at the Contemporary Art Gallery as part of Luminous Sites.

Video documentation is available upon request.

Curated by Daina Augaitis and Karen Henry.