Summary: Ellen Driscoll’s (b. 1953) mixed-media installation, The Loophole of Retreat, is based on Harriet Jacobs’ famous 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Through moving objects projected as images into the interior of a camera obscura, this kinetic work imagines Jacobs’ prolonged experience of the claustrophobic attic in which she hid for seven years as a fugitive slave.
