ARCANA | Carmen Hathaway
Presented in conjunction with Ritualiz’d, PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to announce the launch of a newly commissioned web-based work by Portage la Prairie / Abenaki First Nation artist Carmen Hathaway. The artist’s newest digital work, Arcana, considers notions of ritual in family history, with a focus stemming from several sets of Tarot cards left to Hathaway, painted and illustrated by her maternal grandmother in Europe in the early 1900s.
All are welcome to attend the reception for this web-launch, to take place at PLATFORM Thursday 20 May at 7:00PM. Refreshments will be served.
With Every Secret There is History, Knowledge, Choice.
Introduction by J.J. Kegan McFadden
What are the aspects we cherish most in a history — not our own, not one we’ve constructed, but one we’ve been given, an inherited history? How do we decide to store the components of this history, whether it is photographs, stories, or physical stuff? How do we keep a history that is barely our own alive; and in turn, how do we disseminate history?
Carmen Hathaway has been holding on to decks of hand painted Tarot cards willed to her by her maternal grandmother — Emma Marten, 1897-1994 — for more than fifteen years now. She has been thinking about these cards much longer, since childhood really. The project title, Arcana, is plural for Arcanum — meaning ‘profound secret.’ A deck of Tarot cards then, becomes a repository for secrets, and in someway also a document with answers.
What are the ‘profound secrets’ that make up this history, or any and all family histories for that matter? Hathaway offers glimpses, snapshots and stories we meet with conjecture and weave into our own understandings of how a story is preserved, altered, willed, and survived. The fading in and out of images foregrounds the importance and impermanence of memory; how we use photographs and snapshots to underline meaningful moments in time or people dear to us. A young girl whose pigtails are held into place with satin bows. An elderly woman propped up in a chair, a handmade quilt laid over her lap. The history offered through this interactive website in hints is that of Marten — an apparently stern and stubborn woman. Hathaway’s incorporation of family photographs of her Oma, with music and text amount to an unearthing and piecing together of aspects from Marten’s life … a German immigrant who survived the World Wars, and lived to be nearly one hundred years old, but never found happiness or the fame she so desperately sought. Hathaway uses Marten’s Tarot cards to highlight the loss and grief of this matriarch’s existence. One by one digitizations of these antique cards fall into place, align themselves into a structured reading that the artist does not decipher for us.
Part of the Major Arcana in Tarot readings is The Lovers card. Signaling relationships, but also choice, desire and duty. Interestingly enough, Hathaway calls upon two instances of women ruined by The Lovers card … That of her Oma’s sister who was a bride jilted at the altar and who subsequently died of a broken heart and was then buried in her wedding dress; and then the lore of Die Lorelei from German composer Friedrich Silcher that describes a woman who, betrayed by her lover, kills herself only to lure wayward sailors to their deaths with her siren song from beyond the grave. These, among other visual puzzle pieces begin to amount to a history that is offered somehow generously and furtively all at once. At one point the card with the title “La Fortune” rolls over, below the handwritten inscription is an image of a nude woman walking blindfolded. That is how history falls into place, without any real semblance or warning of the power it has to shape our future.
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