Installation view: PylonsReview: Lara Saxby-Soria Pamlisests (Four Corners Gallery, 22nd April-30th April).
***Digital projection does not move, pixels turn on and off, or change colour.***
In a collision between what appear to be simply twee, dainty yet highly tangible ‘craft-works’ with various modes of projection Lara Saxby-Soria subtly pulls apart a conventional understanding of the seemingly innocent relationship between projection (and, hence, all) technology, the image and the artist’s authorial presence in the artwork.
The three distinct installations address technology of image and its mediating function in the extension of the body (hand) in visual understanding. Yet, as the installation’s fragile sculptural interventions intervene in both the exhibition and projection space - maintaining an obvious presence of the artist’s hand/mark – Saxby ensures a self-reflexivity that resists undermining the potential critique of technology (whilst maintaining it’s place) within art practice.
The most recent work Pylons was the piece of work that I found initially most confusing and unresolved, but out this difficulty it rapidly became the most effective work and best way to understand the depth of the rest of her practice. A data projector rotating on a spinning disc sends a video taken out of a moving train window. Diagonally across the room waxed string forms a condensed series of what you immediately recognize as, albeit slightly child-like, electricity pylons. These both disrupt the projection; casting distorted shadows onto the moving image as it ‘travels’ around the room, and along with the oversized ‘train window’ act to create a warped sense of scale in the room.
In this dimly lit, almost ethereal space the unconventional ‘actual’ movement of the video, along with recognizable, but not strictly representational, real world objects (syntax) the deliberately hand-made aesthetic serves to react against the often-invisible nature of projection.
This is the key to the work’s success, though it seems that the ‘pylons’ are a simple decorative reference to the landscape through which, by experience, we would associate with a train journey; they in fact, through their highly evident and flimsy materiality allow the questioning of the material status of the digital, not to mention the projected, image.
The illusion of space created by the rotating projector highlights the projected image’s illusory and ‘truth – bearing’ potential, but alongside the instability of the material elements of the installation, it becomes a much broader critique of the experience of digital image: that is in its real-life context and as an increasingly default meditative tool.
Throughout this and the earlier works, there is a constant tension between illusory, real movement and with stillness initiated by, and inherent in, the various modes of projection and display.
In Clocks interaction with the gallery space causes a static shot –reflected off a mirror (resting on the floor) onto the projection plane - of a young girl standing in front of a grass verge to flicker and distort. Real movement created by the viewer disrupts the illusory movement of the video, which itself shows captured ‘real-life’ movement.
Again in this work the space between the projector and projection is also interrupted by a lightweight and effortlessly transient sculptural form. A vaguely girl shaped piece of Perspex supports numerous dandelion clocks which appear to float over its surface. Standing in as a tangible, hand-made decoy/interruption it also takes up some of the projection so that the clearest image of the girl is only viewable in the mirror, and only partially viewable on the tracing paper screen. Though it obviously again disrupts the image, the fragility of the dandelion clocks and only faint presence of the then young girl explore the relationship of memory to the reading/authorship of the image and the potential for and intangibility of nostalgic recognition.
Moreover, as the dandelion clocks disintegrate during the course of the exhibition the only physical ‘presence’ of the girl begins to dissolve. Though this makes the image on the screen clearer, this then becomes merely a representation and more obviously an immaterial document of the original event. This morphing of an actual presence into the ephemeral, mirrors the relation between the original event that the video captured and the increasing distance filled by memory as the work, the artist and subject simultaneously grow older: the visible organic degradation of the sculptural form resists transcendental appropriation of the event by the representative symbolism of the image.
This temporary, make-shift and willfully self-undermining tendency runs right through the exhibition; but it is most apparent in the dual 16mm projection Tide: both in its content and in its display.
Appearing to float in the darkened gallery lobby, a double-sided slivered screen at first shows stone cloisters being flooded. The reverse of the screen reveals that this is an illusion. This frame is filled by gently waves breaking on a beach, the shape of the cloister’s foreground hasn’t been blocked allowing some of the light through and creating the apparent flooding of the school.
Although temporality is implicit in the ‘timelessness’ of the sea and the traditional architecture, the most interesting relationship to time is again much more short-term. Referenced by the erosion of the sea, the filmstrip of both projectors is looped around the exhibition space on unmoving reels. (This objectification is reminiscent of, but nowhere near as fetishised as Simon Starling’s Wilhelm Noack oHG (2007)). Thus throughout the course of the exhibition, the inherent movement of the film passing over the defunct reels erodes and destroys the film stock; degrading the projected image as it endlessly loops and repeats itself.
This destructive repetition links back nicely to the, seemingly, endlessly repeatable (and apparently indestructible) digital image that is visualized through projection in the other two works. Memory and movement appear to be frozen and effortless by the ‘perfect’ repetition offered by digital technology, but as Saxby shows by proxy of her hand-made and aesthetically distracting sculptural interventions this is constantly disrupted by itself and its impression of a tangible, malleable extension of the author and reader’s eye and hand.
Tom Clark 2010
