Zoe Beloff Lecture Response

"Hysteria Like cinema only existed in the moment it happens."

"Interested in the embodiment of the unconscious."

Zoe Beloff's lecture took me by surprise due to her tricking the audience the entire time. I had found myself  growing somewhat disinterested half way through the lecture, because I felt I was being given more of a history lecture rather than a lecture about this artist's work. After she answered Drew's question, admitting that the man she was telling us about did not exists, I felt delightfully tricked. Suddenly I felt she had made her audience a part of her artwork. Her medium was not just 2D photographs, drawings, and videos, but it was also performance art. I found this work was the most compelling due to this.

I would define her work as recreations, trickery, and story-like. Beloff created entire lives for these people she come across such as the mental patients, and especially Albert, who she had claimed created these dreams journals. Her work is also very much focused on recreating the sounds and photographs that she found of these women in hysteric fits.

I found I was most interested in her fascinations with the records found of mental patients. I didn't realize that she was this interested in such an interesting subject that she would actually create musicals about them. I love that her work was very much based on her research into the records of these people.

My questions were not clearly answered this time since she focused really on only two of her projects. The second was not answered at all (1. Your work seems to deal a lot with the idea of the supernatural and psychic. Have you ever experimented with using photography to create ghostlike images in a stop motion effect?) but, the second one was somewhat answered by her answer to one of the questions at the end about how she decides upon what medium to use for her work.

My main questions that remain after the lecture deal with me still trying to figure out what she created under the name of Albert and what was truly found drawings and photographs. I still am somewhat unclear about if she had really found all those Coney Island photos or if she had recreated as she did with the hysteric women.