Implicit Lines

Shelley Rae's short video Implicit Lines uses photogram images exposed onto 16mm film, leaving black and white traces of racial conflict while stars and stripes symbolize the promise of freedom. Implicit Lines is part of a larger project named The Dividing Line, which records real person narratives detailing the complexity of America's history of legalized segregation. The title alludes to the Mason-Dixon line, dividing the North from the South, representing mobility vs. slavery. Implicit Lines highlights the separation of Southern whites from Negroes, also confirming the stark reality of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man. The narrator confronts her own social conditioning of the 1950's/60's Jim Crow era and her memories of growing up in the Deep South, before civil rights is legislated. Images of Negroes and non-violent demonstrations are notably absent (invisible) from the film, while found footage/home movie clips show the normalcy of the narrator's life as a child in the midst of revolutionary change