Exposure

Blink and you’ll miss it. Jo Bannon’s intimate one-on-one piece is flashingly short at just 10 minutes, but this sharply crafted and intensely personal experience will stay with you long after you’ve left the dark room in Out of the Blue Drill Hall, where Forest Fringe has returned for its 10^th year. Bannon joins a host of other artists revisiting earlier work— the piece was created in 2012 as the start of an autobiographical thread—to mark the anniversary season.

Bannon’s finely honed encounter explores the acts of seeing and being seen. As a person with albinism, both are palpable concerns for the artist. The condition affects her physical appearance, and therefore the way that people tend to perceive her, but also her eyesight – requiring strong prescription lenses and, earlier in life, causing her to assume she might become blind.

The gentle trust that Bannon establishes here is important, given that as participants we sit alone with her in near-total darkness – a surprisingly disorienting feeling for those who don’t often experience it. Like much of the one-on-one work you’ll see at Forest Fringe, Exposure is very caring for its participants – the nature and terms of the invitation are clearly something that Bannon has worked into the aesthetic and the subject of the piece. It’s she who is opening herself up to the greatest exposure here—both in the physical and emotional sense—our job is simply to listen, and when asked, to look.