Ellipses

2016

Ellipses are the three dots “…” showing that something has been omitted from a larger text.

The Ellipses project consists of video, performance, sculpture and archival research created to celebrate the lives of two gender non-conforming women living in Connecticut during Reconstruction: Carrie Welton and Rebecca Primus, in order to surface their biographies in local archives. It was inspired by the state of Connecticut’s recent rebranding slogan, “CT, Still Revolutionary.”

During 2015-16, I worked with young women from my hometown Waterbury, CT to research untold histories of women who made revolutionary strides in civil rights, labor and education. We questioned, who is considered to be an American revolutionary and how are their stories told? Who is missing from the archive, and how might these stories be surfaced and written into history?

Carrie Welton was a wealthy heiress turned mountain climber who fought and gained the right for women to manage the capital required to run businesses. Rebecca Primus worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau to build schools and teach in the South during Reconstruction. For Welton, a single painted image remains, though her writings were destroyed. For Primus, a cache of letters to a girlfriend remains, though no image.

The working group interviewed and photographed contemporary female activists involved with environmental, labor and criminal justice issues. We filmed a series of performance interventions in locations related to Welton’s and Primus’s lives. These included women parkouring through Welton’s former home turned juvenile detention center for girls, and performing musical Morse code messages in the defunct newspaper which had printed salacious art articles about her. Female equestrians performed on the Waterbury town green where both women, who were accomplished riders, would have been barred.

The work presented at the Mattatuck Museum in 2016 included projected performance video, installation of related objects, and activists’ portraits hung on a false wall in the Museum’s portrait gallery facing images of former industrialists named Kellogg, Chase and Firestone. An accompanying publication featured essays concerning counter publics, Other Spaces, forensic architecture, and the relevance of science fiction to social action.

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Downloadable PDF of the Ellipses publication with contributions by Kim Charles Kay, Myisha Priest, Walidah Imarisha & adrienne maree brown, and denisse andrade.

Social advocates featured in the project’s portrait series:
Fatima Rojas, spokesperson for Unidad Latina en Accion
Barbara Fair, Secretary of the Greater New Haven American Civil Liberties Union
Patricia Kelly, Founding Director of Ebony Horsewomen, Hartford
Carol Burkhart-Lyons, Founding Director of the Naugatuck Valley Project, Waterbury
Joyce Petteway, Chair of the Greater Waterbury NAACP Education Committee

Project Supported by: The Mattatuck Museum, CT Humanities Fund, CT Community Fdn. and Parsons School of Design.