BmoreArt

A new project from Mark Alice Durant, Saint Lucy is devoted to writing about photography, contemporary art, and the lovely people of Baltimore.

The name Lucy derives from the Latin word for light – Lux. Saint Lucy (283-304) was a young Sicilian woman who was martyred when she refused to marry a pagan nobleman. Sentenced to be defiled in a brothel, legend has it that when the nobleman’s guards came to take her away she was immovable as a mountain. She suffered numerous tortures including having her eyes gouged out. Another version of the story has Lucy taking out her own eyes because her would-be husband admired them. Saint Lucy is the patron saint of the blind, of eye disorders and the protector of sight. The Catholic Church describes her as “One of the brightest ornaments of the Sicilian Church”. She is often portrayed in religious paintings holding a golden plate upon which her eyes rest. Her feast day is December 13, which in the Julian calendar was thought to be the shortest day of the year. In Sweden her feast day is vividly celebrated with processions in which the youngest girl of the house wears a headdress of candles.

During the summer of 2010, when I was thinking about launching a website, I made lists of possible names, ‘Light Box’, ‘Caja de Luz’, many of which were unavailable. I would stay up late into the night purchasing numerous lame domain names (‘Luminous Flux’, anyone?). I was reading Maggie Nelson’s compelling meditation on the meaning of the color blue – Bluets – in which she invokes the legend of Saint Lucy. I remembered all those plates full of eyes: Lux, lucid, Lucy in the Sky, Camera Lucida, even. I was struck. Lucy acknowledges darkness and the coming of light.

Mark Alice Durant is an artist, writer and occasional curator. He is Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Previously he has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of New Mexico, Syracuse University, ICP and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. His photographs, installations and performances have been presented at a variety of galleries and museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Everson Museum, Christopher Grimes Gallery and Artists Space in NYC. With Mathew Wilson, he co-founded the performance duo ‘men of the world’ that created actions and interventions on the streets of many North American cities throughout the 1990s. He is author of McDermott and McGough: A History of Photography and Robert Heinecken: A Material History. With Jane D. Marsching he was co-author and co-curator of Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal and with Thomas Piche was co-author and co-curator of Some Assembly Required: Collage Culture in Post-War America. He writes regularly for the photography journal Aperture, is an editor for Dear Dave, magazine and has contributed essays to numerous anthologies and monographs including Marco Breuer: Early Recordings, Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing and The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. In 2008 he curated Notes on Monumentality at the Baltimore Museum of Art.