Night Walk

by Katha Seidman

An installation at the Brookline Center for the Arts in October 2016, Night Walk filled the narrow gallery with an eerie three-dimensional narrative that juxtaposed the beauty of woods in moonlight with the anxiety every woman feels when she walks alone.

Viewed from both inside and outside the gallery, Night Walk borrowed motifs from romantic stories and fairytales to explore how distress from traumatic events – either experienced vicariously through the news or personally – upends the simple pleasure of walking in moonlight. A monochrome landscape at the edge of a pond covered the entire gallery wall. In the middle of that romantic landscape a caged door with a distressed mirror sat atop a staircase. From the faucet in the mirror a knotted sheet poured down the steps, suggesting either an improvised ladder – or oozing viscera. Around the edges green glass globes dotted clumps of straw deposited as if by receding water. All were props in a suggested drama. 

Influenced by Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Cornell, this three-dimensional story contained an unsettling reality: women alone at night are vulnerable to violence.