Project: Dodie Bellamy – “Kathy Forest”

White Columns is proud to present “Kathy Forest” an installation by the celebrated San Francisco-based writer Dodie Bellamy. Kathy Acker, the novelist and theorist, died from breast cancer in 1998. Her papers are at Duke, but her clothes and accessories remain in the possession of her executor, Matias Viegener. Dodie Bellamy will display a selection of Kathy Acker’s clothes – suspended from the ceiling – in White Columns project space. In February 2005 while visiting Viegener in Los Angeles, Bellamy rummaged through Acker’s extravagant designer wardrobe and, in her own words, “wheedled one of her Gaultier dresses, and a couple pieces of jewelry” from Viegener. About this act Bellamy has said that “Possessing such intimate effects of a woman I wasn’t so much friends with as in awe of, I felt compelled to write it all out.” In her subsequent text “Digging Through Kathy Acker’s Stuff” – which Bellamy will read at White Columns on January 10th at 7.30pm – Bellamy meditates upon “relics, ghosts, compulsive shopping, archives, make-up, our drive to mythologize the dead, Acker’s own self-mythologizing, the struggle among followers to define Acker, bitch fights, and the numina of DNA.”

Dodie Bellamy lives and works in San Francisco. She is the author of numerous books including The Letters of Mina Harker (1998, Hard Press); Cunt-Ups (2001, Tender Buttons Books); and Pink Steam (2004, Suspect Thoughts Press.) Her essays have appeared in The Village Voice; Bookforum; The San Francisco Chronicle; Nest, and else where. Along with Kevin Killian she is the co-editor and publisher of the literary ‘zine Mirage/Period(ical). In 2006 White Columns presented an installation by Bellamy and Killian of material relating to Mirage/Period(ical).

“Kathy Forest” was originally presented in July 2006, in a slightly different form, as a part of “Five Habitats: Squatting at Langton” – a series of projects and events curated by White Columns’ director Matthew Higgs for New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA.