German horror classic finds new life in ‘Shadow Cabinet’

March 28, 2025

In a new exhibition opening at CCAD’s Beeler Gallery on Thursday, March 13, Mary Jo Bole and Danielle Norton draw a line from the Trump era to the 1920 film ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.’

BY ANDY DOWNING ● ART, CULTURE ● MARCH 12, 2025

Danielle Norton (left) and Mary Jo Bole work on a piece for “Shadow Cabinet”. Photo by Scott Vogel.

“Shadow Cabinet,” the most recent collaboration between artists Mary Jo Bole and Danielle Norton, emerged last fall amid casual brainstorming sessions that Bole termed “band practice,” owing to the freestyle nature of these get togethers.

“We didn’t know what we were going to do, but we were worried about the elections and just anguished with [the state of] the world,” Bole said in an early March interview. “Every day the conversation was a litany of everything scary: [Trump] trying to say that Ukraine started the war [with Russia], cuts to Medicaid. And then we’d get going and someone would say, ‘Okay, now that’s enough of that!’”

As these conversations continued, the two gradually began to break down the numerous similarities they saw developing between the current socio-political era and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” a silent, surrealist German horror film released in 1920, and which Bole first encountered in 1976 as an art school student in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “And it’s always stayed with me, and those sets have always been in my brain,” said Bole, who recalled being struck by the way certain aspects of the film’s set design reminded her of Cleveland “and the sort of industrial slime that I’ve always been interested in there.”

In revisiting the film, though, new connections developed for the two, particularly related to both the rise of Donald Trump – in his book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer wrote that the film “reflects a subconscious need in German society for a tyrant,” citing it is an example of Germany’s unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority – and in the ways the movie blurs the line between fiction and reality similar to what we’re seeing now with the continued emergence of AI technologies.

“I mean, so much of it fits perfectly: the brainwashed somnambulist, the sleeping public. I can hardly believe how well the film mashes up with what’s going on,” said Bole, who has attempted to maintain a sense of perspective amid this downward spiral. “I read people like [political historian] Heather Cox Richardson, and I love how she puts everything in context, so we know these things come in waves. But I just turned 69, so it’s like, shit, do I have to go out on this horrible wave as opposed to things maybe looking up a little bit? It just seems really, really bleak right now.”

Considering the feel of the times and of these early, tone-setting conversations, it shouldn’t surprise that the art that emerged from the two trended in a decidedly dark direction, beginning with a towering, 15-foot-tall hunting blind and encompassing a pair of shadowy, large-scale pastel drawings, one of which drew comparisons to Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” when Bole posted an early draft of the work online. “And it was like, oh, that’s sort of the same subject matter, sort of in the same family,” Bole said, and laughed.

Bole and Norton previously worked together on “Swimming Under a Stone Filter,” staged in the Dream Clinic Project Space in Oct. 2021, with Bole drawn to the way the collaboration continues to tease out new dimensions in both artists. “We each have an idea that we bring to it, and you think it’s going here, but then it ends up going somewhere entirely,” said Boll, who will join Norton at CCAD’s Beeler Gallery in celebrating the opening of “Shadow Cabinet” on Thursday, March 13. “It never would have been this show if one of us separately had made this work.”

Where “this show” might land was still up for some debate in early March. At the time, the two had completed a staggering number of elements for the exhibition, including: a “sinister” hunting blind modeled on the ones Bole encountered regularly while driving to a hidden away brick factory each summer; a companion, Caligari-esque ladder adapted from a cherry picker’s ladder; large-scale pastel drawings; a series of watercolors; an outsized, bare-limbed tree assembled in part from a fallen trunk rescued from Norton’s property; and a video installation featuring a belly dancer whose gyrations Bole said are meant to reflect “the knots in the stomach” brought about by these various accumulating modern horrors. Yet despite all the work done, Bole expressed some trepidation about how the exhibition would come together in the final weeks.

“I’m very curious how everything will turn out,” said Bole, who noted the artists were still weighing aspects such as how and where to screen the video footage, in addition to different ways they could deploy lights on some of the pieces to add creeping shadows to the space reflective of those in the film. “Everything’s in the gallery, so we’re in those final tweaking stages. … I just hope we can pull it all off.”