Asher Hartman
Kay Whale: Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses and Gaunt Motherfuckers.

Excerpt from an upcoming book read by the artist.

Two channel video. 2024

In the words of interdisciplinary artist, writer and theater director Asher Hartman, “‘Kay Whale: Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers’ is the story of my life as a dissociated multiply inhabited girl whale with a violent man inside her.

The book is a funky meditation on the damage done by the destruction of the feminine as felt in our overlapping and multiple selves that travel with us in life death and the spirit worlds.”

Recorded in his studio in a single unrehearsed take this stunning performance marks a new direction in Hartman's formidable interdisciplinary oeuvre. The two channel video is displayed on vertically installed monitors where the second bottom monitor (the author is cut off at the waist) is filled with a digitally generated whale tail.

This disorienting magical realism-like montage of a great blue tail adds another layer of both humor and sadness to the exquisite words and corpse of the protagonist as they navigate their lives in Los Angeles.