“Betsy and I Killed the Bear is an expression whose meaning has been lost. Like many of the things I work with, it is an evocative archaeological find whose significance is not immediately discernable. Its meaning—as nearly as I am able to reconstruct it—has to do with taking credit for something one has not done. But this meaning has become so obscure that it remains more or less a private one to the individuals in the photographs, in particular to my Aunt Dorothy, who mentioned it to me in conversation a few years ago; now 91, and languishing in a sanatorium, she will take it, along with the whole apparatus of her understandings of these events and places, with her to her grave”.
Michael Huey
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Betsy and I Killed the Bear at Charim Gallery, Vienna, 14. February – 31. March 2007
