Director’s Choice: Spectral Evidence by Nancy Bowen

Inspired by a true story of Colonial American judgement and repentance, Nancy Bowen creates a visual interpretation of guilt and remorse in Spectral Evidence. Bowen’s ancestor Samuel Sewall was a judge in the Salem witch trials who later publicly recanted and confessed his sins in church. The installation visually interprets his penitence and gives space for the people killed as witches as a result of the trials. Twenty gravestones face off their accuser while he bears the burden of their deaths.

Riffing off Early American gravestone imagery Bowen deconstructs the “death head” image to create winged creatures with feet stuck in the amorphously shaped stones. The dead could rise again- at least in spirit.

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