For many years, Linda James worked on one conceptual artwork: Quicksilver.
The piece is comprised of seventy-four photographs of the backs of men’s heads from the crowning of a baby boy to a male cadaver. It was originally created between 1992 and 1998, but expanded in content and physical size as it was placed in different iconic and mostly empty places until 2018 when the piece was retired. The photographs varied in size depending upon their environment, from a few inches to a few feet. Although taken with black and white film, they were developed as color. The result was subtle hints of rose and sage green and gray-blue, all beyond the control of the artist. The piece was shown in many places, including: an avant-garde art gallery in Glasgow, Scotland; an abandoned Dominican friary in Krakow, Poland; an abandoned biker bar in a town of seven, Cisco, Utah; an abandoned beauty salon in downtown Chicago; the center of The Madison Review, a book of art, poetry and fiction; a woman’s bathroom in an armory interior soon to be gutted in Madison, Wisconsin. The final installation was a street kiosk in Madison called the “Little Gallery” which often featured ephemeral work not for sale.
A description of the work from the artist in 1999. Titled, The Heads, it reads: “Much has been made of the “gaze” lately. The term means a way of looking, often from a position of power or control, like that of the voyeur. In art, the gaze has had connotations of men looking at women, of male control and the objectification of women as in the artist and his model. What interests me is the idea of reciprocal gaze - a sort of looking back or maybe just a different way of looking, the way a woman might look straight into a man’s eye. My heads are about the reciprocal gaze and about rethinking identity….To photograph the back instead of the face brings to mind street encounters and projection of identity onto a stranger, a sore of flotsam and jetsam of thought as one moves along in the rhythm of modern life. The back of a head subsumes individual identity into a larger sense of the other (although I have found that all these men are quite recognizable from their backs, which tells me something about what we don’t see about ourselves). The heads are a way of equalizing gender, rethink fable and male and general humanness.
In the early 1990s, Linda was part of a small group of artists that called themselves The International School of Lose Affilations. The group had a credo of anonymity and chance encounter, one that would thwart the over commercialization of art and the for-profit celebration of the super-star artist. Part of the project was to find iconic places in America that were being left behind, such as an abondoned drive-in theater, and install the artwork in them, only to leave the work to the elements, strangers, and time. Four artists, including Linda, installed their work in the ruin of the White Buffalo Bar and Gas Station in Cisco, Utah, literally a town of seven with no services. For the ten days or so of the installation, people would appear from nowhere to see what we were doing, to talk, to express intrigue with the art and our ideas. European tourists, local Native Americans. travelers from all walks of life came. Daily, the engineers from the massive train that sped by the sight would sound the whistle and wave to us. As per our credo, we left all the work that we had installed to whatever might come. And in the summer of 1997, a writer from Time magazine who was traveling the backroads of American and may have been told, or simply happened upon our work, wrote the following:
The sign that greets you from the highway says it all: CISCO, NO SERVICES. What this microscopic settlement does have is an art installation, one as mysterious as a UFO landing pad. Last year some artists from outside quietly transformed an old gas station. Inside, cowboy boots hang in midair, skewered by metal poles. One wall is lined with photographs of the backs of people’s [sic] heads. Strands of twine lasso a brick to the floor. Twig crosses, arrangements of broken glass - locals who ask if it isn’t witchcraft have a point. When you discover this place, you remember that art is a kind of sorcery. Time: America the Inside Story, July 7, 1997