This film is the final work of Maria Frances Clarke, a performance artist and filmmaker previously known for her role as Carey Logan. Carey Logan was the fictive persona of Pine City, the collective of Tyler Savage, Jes Winsome, Marlin Mayfield, and Jack Wells.

DROP OUT PIECE is the last of Clarke’s seven known works.

Max took in my blank face with confusion, then—a funny kind of understanding.

“Well, it makes sense that he told you,” she whispered, disappointed. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.” As other people around us began to read, a murmur went through the crowd, and then people were talking loudly. The lights went down. I don’t know if Pine City took their seats. People were talking right up to the opening credits.

BODY OF WORK

A film by Pine City

The first page of the DROP OUT notebook was projected. People audibly gasped. Then—twenty-two minutes passed as we watched a woman who looked exactly like Carey Logan on the shores of the black lake. Sweating through her leopard coat, her white dress, she mixed cement and poured it into her boots. Then she walked into the water and she did not come back.

The atmosphere of the room was like a solar eclipse. One second, everything was normal—and the next, it was inside out, shadows dripping from every ceiling tile, spreading from beneath every seat, filling our throats, our chests. “She swam out of view,” someone said. “There’s nowhere for her to go,” someone else pointed out. “That was fake, right?” another asked. “I hope so,” their companion replied. Agitation shuddered through the room, the wooden armrests shaking, the velvet seats suddenly scratchy and too small.

The film cut to Tyler in his studio, a close-up, in front of an unlit forge. He looked tired. “We were twenty-one,” he said. “Me, and Marlin, and Jack. A mortician visited Senior Thesis and taught us how to sculpt a human ear. We were impressed. We made ears, as instructed. We got inspired, and stayed late in the studio, after the mortician had left. We made noses, and later that week, a head, a torso. It was soothing, a welcome distraction, from the pressure of our own thesis projects.”

Cut to Marlin, in her own studio, light streaming in from the window onto her lovely soft face, the Blake quote on the wall behind her: “We decided to try our hands at a whole body. The process was initially difficult, but we found a way to work that combined our preferred mediums: paint, ceramics, fiber. We could all draw—that great and bounding line—we all had the hand.”