Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela

My first year of teaching high school in the Bronx, in addition to being a crash course in the art of teaching and learning, taught me all about the overhead projector. I remember one such experience with the overhead quite clearly: I had copied a section of text with which I planned on modeling annotation in real time with my students. They had the text in front of them, and I had it in front of me on the overhead. We had gone over three guidelines for how to tackle annotations: Circle unknown or interesting words, underline any sentences or parts of sentences that seem important, ask questions and make summary notes in the margins of the text. The plan was to give students time to do some annotation work in pairs, and then we would do the annotation as a whole class with them guiding me on the overhead. Everyone would then add to their annotations as various class members contributed. Not a terrible plan for a first-year teacher, but for some reason, on just that day, the overhead decided it had a mind of its own.

As my students called out the various words they had circled and the aspects of the text about which they had posed questions, and I made the appropriate markings, the focus on the overhead began to change. Suddenly, it would zoom, and then, in trying to fix it, I wouldn’t be able to get the focus back to normal. With my students beginning to chuckle and get distracted, and me not wanting the lesson to fail and not knowing how to alter it on the spot, I kept going with or without clear focus. As the overhead continually moved its projection, abstracting certain parts of the text or my nervous underlinings or scribbles, I could hear myself talking through the process, pretending nothing unusual was happening in an attempt to keep my students on task. I now imagine my students’ experience of this overhead debacle. The dark classroom, the unruly overhead distorting my annotations and projecting all of my attempts at refocusing, my hands casting shadows and obscuring the text in the process. The neat legibility that I had hoped for, complete control of “student learning”, opened up to another experience that I only further facilitated because I didn’t know how to stop it.

Kerry Downey’s performance, Fishing with Angela (2016), has nothing to do with my first-year teacher ineptness, but it does have to do with the lining out of a pedagogical experience and relationship, in part through the overhead projector. Sitting in the audience of Downey’s performance at Queens Museum on May 22, 2016, the memory of my last experience with the overhead shocked itself back into my view. It was thus somehow comforting watching Downey, in full control of the work on the overhead’s surface. The performance was structured by a double-channel projection, the right side a film projection of Downey’s mentor, artist Angela Dufresne, and the left side projections of Downey’s own work on the overhead. The film of Dufresne, shot by Downey, takes place during a fishing trip that the two artists take together. Dufresne talks about her relationship to fishing, and we see her hands working with the fishing tackle. During the performance at Queens Museum, Downey used water, or other props, to draw out Dufresne’s gestures, shadowing or reinstating Dufresne’s own movements that we could see happening on the right. Part mimicry and, of course, something that achieves its own level of abstracted form, Fishing with Angela layers various kinds of pedagogical complexity. Absent in the actual film of Dufresne, Downey reacts and responds aloud at times during the performance, filling in the conversation that perhaps we, in the audience, do not see happening in the original setting. It is also possible that Downey’s verbal reactions and responses are more like commentary, foot- or sidenotes, reflections on the relationship we see obliquely documented before us.

A signal to Downey’s own relationship to Dufresne, the overhead interestingly doubles the role of teacher in this piece. The choice of the overhead technology complicates the line between left- and right-projected image, between mentor and mentee. Downey, as student, performs or mimics the teacher; Downey, as teacher, instructs the audience on Dufresne’s own painterly practice and, in the process, performs their own.

On the way out of class that day, one of my students lingered behind to ask me if I had ever used an overhead projector before. He then proceeded to turn it back on and show me how it was done. It worked perfectly.