The episodes of the video series Daughter of the Cave, by Paige Adair, are in part a powerful meditation on folktales and explorations of cave environments as a metaphorical site of eruptive change. Adair seeks to understand how gender can be construed and inflected within these liminal underground spaces.
The series incorporates collaged animation and sonic elements from a variety of sources. The cave watercolors that swirl in the background are based on the Speleogen Team’s photos of the The Jam Hole, a resonant chamber within Petty John’s Cave where the team recorded its first musical improvisations. Additionally, Adair employs video and still images extracted during excursions to Ruby Falls and Luray Caverns, while also appropriating imagery from popular fables– here most notably Red Riding Hood and myth of The Gorgon.
Sound engineer Mason Brown provides a haunting score that compliments the claustrophobic ambiance of Adair’s collaged aesthetic. Just as Adair re-purposes and reshapes images inspired by the Speleogen’s documentary photography as well as her own caving adventures, Brown engineers the soundscape by revisiting audio archive made by Speleogen in their cave-based and inspired recordings.
The resulting pieces, a conversation between Adair’s mythological and highly feminine iconography and Brown’s aural atmospherics, exemplifies Speleogen’s collaborative methodology and new interpretations of the landscapes they explore.
Speleogen is a collaborative venture that teams artists working in different media (photography, music, writing, video) to produce a suite of interrelated pieces that have been provoked by encounters with the natural environment. Focusing specifically on the morphology and biodiversity of caves and the activities and histories of caving, especially in and around the mountains of North Georgia.
Paige Adair is an Atlanta artist working in time-based media, sculpture, and painting. Her practice explores narrative structures and spatial relations, combing a study of fairy tales, fantasy, cultural ephemera, and magical realism. She seeks to subvert paradigms in existing narratives by twisting their symbols and fragments into new media works. She received her interdisciplinary MFA at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a bachelor’s degree in Painting from Georgia State University. By day she arranges an array of architectural media as the Visual Materials Archivist for The Portman Archives. www.paigeadairartist.com