Articulating a point of view
by Flis Holland
Part of an ongoing series of works, the installation takes us back to a house in England. This eerie domestic setting seems suspended in time, held just beyond our reach, but it is also set in relationship to the physical environment in which we view the work. The insistent, repeated return to this particular site bears the characteristics of a traumatic dream or a haunting, while the structure of the installation reflects both the ambivalence of the desire to return and the difficulty in articulating such a compulsion.
The process begins with the construction of a scale model, within which photographs are taken using a mobile phone. These are then transferred to 35mm slides, which are installed within a series of daylight viewing boxes and distributed throughout the gallery. The boxes are hung using a system of wires and weights that suspends these fragments in mid-air and responds to the touch and movement of visitors. This hanging system acts both as a framing device and as a metaphorical extension of what is on display inside the boxes.
The images themselves, the conjured spaces within the boxes, are suffused in a flat light and emptied both of people and of the normal detritus of domestic life. The occasional traces of activity – a broken pane of glass, a lump under the rug – provide a few clues as to what might have taken place, but what little information they offer does not take us very far, and ultimately just frustrates our curiosity. The inscrutable nature of the images, some even refusing to come into focus, is complemented by the forced gestures of the viewer. Repeatedly shifting her gaze between the space of the gallery and that contained within the boxes, she is engaged in a continual process of looking away.
The setup foregrounds the act of seeing, which is performed by the visitors to the exhibition. In order to satisfy the scopophilic urge to look into the box, the spectator must turn her gaze away from the surrounding populated space of the gallery, relinquishing a level of self-awareness and control. This visible blindness, seen by the other spectators waiting for their turn, increases the tension and can give rise to the unsettling feeling that something – or someone – remains just out of view in the photograph.
The strict viewing conditions within the context of the exhibition – the transition from the gallery space to that within the boxes, the public performance of a very private act of seeing, the singular viewing of each image – cannot be recreated when the images are viewed as prints, nor is it possible to successfully document the installed works using photography or video. In the attempts to do so the tension between the spatial and the pictorial, present in the exhibition in the passage from the minimalist installation of the boxes to the images held within, endlessly reproduces and reasserts itself.
Funded by a research grant from the Kone Foundation.
www.flisholland.fi
