My Deuce, My Double, My Dear Image is a line of poetry borrowed from WH Auden’s most highly praised yet least popular work, The Age of Anxiety. This audio work was produced by Rebecca La Marre for AKA artist-run in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, during a residency throughout 2021. It is published in a format reminiscent of early 2000s You-Tube amateur audiobooks.

The text was produced using daily writings that span November 2019 to May 2020. The assembled fragments were selected approximately chronologically, but otherwise at random. The auto-fictive texts were edited by a process that involved reading aloud and then parsing the result with transcription software, ultimately creating a script that was then recorded. This way of working is a nod to writers and artists like Kathy Acker, Eva Hesse, R. D. Laing, André Breton, René (Colette Thomas) and Lucy Lippard.

Through this process it became clear that the selection of text was determined by a fragment’s lack of specificity, despite its arrival during an event. The feelings and experiences described, upon examination, could refer to instances in other times and places, as well as to those of other people. Phrases were sometimes identifiable as echoes of the speech, writing and half-remembered stories of other speakers.

The result is a text that bears witness to how the mind creates pain, what disassociation looks like as a mode of being-in-language, and what French writers refer to as la force mobilisatrice des images. The text is an esquisse, an outline, an arrow moving towards the horizon of a non-appropriative and materialist argument for art’s capacity to heal and language’s capacity to change bodies.

45 mins 01 mins