Val

“Val” is a short film that serves as the finale for a performance piece Mara Mckevitt began in 2019 in which she inhabited the character of a fictional artist named Val Breeder, a condescending yet captivating recluse, with an antiseptic sensibility and a taste for the obscene. In “work” and “social” environments, Mckevitt presented herself as Val’s pliant yet contemptuous assistant, while in fact playing both roles until 2022 when she began production for the short.

In an arresting performance by Emily Allan, Val catches her assistant, played by Mckevitt herself, in the act of reclaiming her intellectual property. The film is an assistant's revenge fantasy brought brutally to life, a portrait of work dynamics between women in the wake of #metoo, and a camp spectacle of mainstream media’s interchangeable vernacular of sex and violence. Set over the course of a single afternoon in a cluttered, claustrophobic office, the film tracks Val’s assistant’s attempt to extricate herself from the relationship. Their mutually-constructed, mutually-destructive dynamic puts the lie to the performance of “professional” workplace: the scripts of boss and employee, artist and assistant are shot through with domination and submission, roles that trouble the boundaries of the economic with the sexual and vice versa, contaminating the already unstable categories at the heart of all labor. The convention of shot-reverse-shot is interrupted by surveillance footage of the scene, a bird’s eye view that highlights the perversity and power within the viewer’s and director’s gaze.

An accompanying video series (in post-production) documents the film’s making: acting training that Mara underwent to play herself on screen, with Emily Allan serving as acting coach, and as they rehearse, Emily’s embodiment of Val. Here, the roles of director and actor are themselves subjected to the perverse reversals shown of the film's diegesis: between boss and employee, dominance and submission are never as clear as we think.