Blue of Noon
7:13. Digital video projected on custom 9 x 14 ft screen. 2012.
The video installation Blue of Noon, created specifically for the 2012 Installation Biennial, addresses the history of the Appleton Museum, suggesting an homage to the wife of the founder of the Appleton, Martha Appleton (born O’Driscoll) using an icon drawn from her work in Hollywood. The flying bat serves as a reference to the 1945 Universal film House of Dracula, which starred Martha O’Driscoll before she became the wife of Appleton Museum founder, Arthur I. Appleton.
This film was the last of Universal's "monster" films, and pivots on a scene in which Dracula (John Carradine) seduces O'Driscoll's character using music. This becomes a kind of picture for the seduction promised by the 'aesthetic experience.' The title Blue of Noon refers to the 1935 novella of the same name by Georges Bataille, which is an allegory of seduction and horror.
This installation highlights a number of fugitive interconnected relationships: that of the viewer moving through the space of a collection, that of the art patron funding a collection, and that of the architecture’s relation to the individual subject.
Blue of Noon from Wes Kline on Vimeo.
