New York's Bitforms Gallery by G. Roger Denson for Huffington Post
By Claudia Hart, 2012, 12-minute 3D
animated loop for installation
Dark kNight, 2012, is Hart's response to Christopher Nolan's 2012 film, The Dark Knight Rises, depicting the attempt of one of her avatars to break free of the simulated world behind the screen. In creating Dark kNight (spelling intentional), 2012, Hart felt it was time to begin a migration out of the sanctuary cacoon of her earlier automatons. She represents the attempt of this defiant one to break free of the simulated sanctuary world behind the screen.
The popular Christopher Nolan The Dark Knight Rises, is a film about escape from imprisonment and the powers that deem who is and isn't to be imprisoned. With the film's two highly independent, physically athletic and defiant female characters, both of whom have escaped their own entrapment, Hart was immediately prompted to envision her own restless, racially-hybrid female avatar trying out various strategies to escape virtuality.
In the video we see her hurling herself against the screen; swinging from her feet by a rope and hitting the screen full body; catapulting like a human cannonball into the screen; and as seen here, swinging with a rope by her hands and hitting the screen with her feet--all seen at various speeds.
Hart claims the mythological source for the figure, besides Nolan's Batman, is the chained Prometheus, bound by the Olympian gods for bringing fire to humankind. Artistically she is inspired by Michaelangelo's Dying Captives, who appear to struggle in their efforts to release themselves from their prisons of stone.
Roger Denson
Excerpted from
Women's Mythopoetic Art: Going Back to Start, Heroically
Huffington Post, 8/12/2012
Roger Denson, Post Pictures, Huffington Post, 12/13/2013