Mara McKevitt
DP
18 November — 20 December 2025
DP presents two videos, played on standing monitors facing inward. The stands are placed to allow only enough space for a single person to view in one direction at a time. A narrow, uncompromising source of tunnel vision met with the din of anticipation and opposition. In one, a boom pole, used to extend the reach of a microphone, hovers over a four-poster bed in a white suburban bedroom.
There is a dim apprehension in both the menace of the boom and its operator, a pending fantasy that looms overhead. The head of the microphone swaying as if tracing or tracking something in the room, edging towards the idea of live action, suspended in an ambling state on the verge of nothing. The absence is palpable. In the other video, a low-resolution colonoscopy screen in real time, captured by the artist, the patient is behind the camera. Meta visualizations inside a dissociative fugue. The footage of the colonoscope camera’s journey through grotesque terrain is, at times, almost unbearable to watch. It is a deeply intimate and alien scene, set against the grain of the stark bedroom scene it faces. The abject and erotic are self-referential tools of insight, felt as McKevitt’s body is examined. The tensions of control and surrender rise to the surface.
As physical instruments, the boom and camera penetrate from above and within. They are objects of intrusion and capture, while the videos are idle carriers of the promise of pleasure through obscenity. A vivid droning score by artist Valerie Keane accompanies the installation. Dissonant meter and tonal value churns and echoes between the two screens, moving like shadows that cast over and under. The sonic flush of Keane’s composition pulses with the videos’ visual information, interlocking with moments of pause and tumult.
Mara McKevitt’s DP considers the thin space between desire and occupation in mediated settings; the bedroom staged for a scene, the clinic for a medical procedure. Both are environments of observation and vulnerability, and exposure. Choice is an illusion complicit in maintaining self as scene partner. Narrative boundaries between labor and persona, figure and imagination, collapse in deadlock. A saturated state of discomfort sutures into neglect. The agony of discomfort expands outwards, of waiting for what is to come, in the fallout of anticipation.
— Claire Sammut
“[The abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the 'I' does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.”
– Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982.
DP, 2025
4K Video, sound, looped
Portable Monitor Stands