Matter News (04/25/24)

“Family White Elephants,” the new documentary from Columbus-by-way-of-Cleveland artist Mary Jo Bole, took more than eight years to complete but stretches back generations, with Bole unpacking her family lineage as a means of dealing with the numerous heirlooms and sundry items passed down through her parents.

Bole first hatched the idea for the film while installing an elaborate handmade wallpaper exhibit at CCAD in 2015, its panels rooted in various historical family photographs and inherited objects. 

“It took three years to hand make that wallpaper installation, and I thought I would burn all the emotional connection to this family stuff, and get it out of my system,” said Bole, whose documentary will premiere at the Wexner Center for the Arts as part of the Cinema Columbus Film Festival on Thursday, April 25. (Click here for a full schedule of Cinema Columbus films and showtimes.) “But the show was supposed to last three months, and instead the wallpaper came down after a month, which made me as covetous as ever.”

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In the entry and dining rooms of Mary Jo Bole’s Harrison West home, walls lined with ornate artwork and portraits of distant relatives surround a cache of heirlooms. Two chests store her late mother’s belongings and century-old silver passed down through her father’s Andrew Carnegie-descended lineage. A hutch holds stacks of china and crystal glassware while nearby sit an old gas lamp and her grandmother’s glass-enclosed, silver vase, a gift from the Gilded Age industrialist.

“I love my mom’s side because all we have from her side is a cup that came on a boat from Prague,” the Cleveland-born artist says. “In some ways, it’s a relief to have just one object to carry all this meaning as opposed to this pile of crap that gets at me.”

Bole’s home has become a physical representation of the “Victorian leftover culture” that she explores in her upcoming autobiographical film, “Family White Elephants.” Nearly six years in the making, the documentary builds on her 2015 installation of the same name at the Columbus College of Art & Design, inspired by a porcelain white elephant found in the background of an 1880 interior shot of an ancestor’s home.

Through the story of her creative practice, the 67-year-old sculptor spins parallel tales of her hometown, its history and the legacy of her Victorian family members in the feature-length piece, connecting them through death, grief and the emotional weight of her inherited objects. “These were ideas and things that we talked about as she was editing it,” says Jennifer Lange, the Wexner Center for the Arts’ Film/Video curator who’s advised Bole on the project since its inception. “I’ve seen so many cuts of this film over the years, and seeing how it’s evolved and the questions that she’s had about it—questions we’ve had about it—I feel like she’s definitely learned a lot.”

As the project nears completion, Bole, an inaugural Ohio Humanities at the Wex Film Fellow, is curating the film’s score, smoothing transitions and fine-tuning voice-overs at the Wex’s Film/Video Studio; she’ll be working with Lange to color and audio correct in August.

The bulk of the edits, however, are occurring in Bole’s backyard studio, also brimming with what she affectionately calls “MJ-ville”: boxes of 19th-century family archives, her old drawings and abstract sculptures, and piles of research for her next film on monument plaques.

She expects to finish “Family White Elephants” by September with hopes that it will give her the closure she needs as the last living family member with keen knowledge of their predecessors.

“I gave half of the archive to the Western Reserve [Historical Society] museum—five [boxes]—and I think that’s the only reason they’re going to take the rest of it,” she says. “Man, I’m gonna load them up because, I have to say, I love all of it, but it is time to get rid of it.”