The present work is the very first in Gordon’s Blind Stars series. Blind Audrey is particularly interesting as it echoes the artist’s installation Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) shown in 1997 at Skulptur. Projekte in Münster, which also tied in with Gordon’s fascination with actors (for further details on that work see Douglas Gordon, “Douglas Gordon (–) Between Darkness & Light (after William Blake)”, in Klaus Bußmann, Kasper König and Florian Matzner (eds.), Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 1997, exhib. cat. Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997, p. 175).
Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) pairs a film about divine revelation with another about satanic possession. Projected onto opposite sides of the same translucent screen, the two films overlap back to back; a dark area in one image makes the other more visible, and two bright sequences nearly extinguish each other. When viewers walk into the path of the projections, they cast shadows on one side of the screen, revealing a clearer image of the other film within them. Both films—The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, and The Song of Bernadette (1943), directed by Henry King—are about adolescent girls driven by external forces. In The Exorcist, Regan is possessed by the devil; in The Song of Bernadette, the heroine's revelation leads her to steer her life toward God.
Gordon plays both films at their real speed and with their original soundtracks; simply starting them at the same time and letting them run generates a constant variation of image and sound level. In an oscillating battle of images, a purgatory-like weighing of good and evil emerges. Neither Heaven nor Hell, Devil nor God, wins.