Bio
CV
2025
I WAS BORNE UPSTAIRS
Archer Boyette & Ellen Boyette
Looping 16mm, looping recording, candles, red fabrics, filters, and lights
I WAS BORNE UPSTAIRS is a collaborative installation that re-envisions a canonical scene in Jane Eyre.
The scene of violence with which the novel begins – John Reed’s assault on Jane, her passionate counterattack, and subsequent forced isolation in the red room – associates rebellion and autonomy with bloodletting and incarceration. Like many cinematic adaptations, Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943) omits the red room scene altogether, reimagining the novel as a romance rather than a bildungsroman and reducing Jane to a romantic figure.
I WAS BORNE UPSTAIRS offers a sensorial reimagining of the red room through two primary interventions – the erasure of text and the erasure of emulsion – to engage with and embody Jane’s fractured psyche. Beyond illuminating the novel’s major themes (madness, the paranormal, imprisonment, and freedom), I WAS BORNE UPSTAIRS frames the red room as integral to our understanding of Jane in all her complexity.