Second year MFA Kristin Kozlowski and first year MFA Sandra Gonzalez are the latest in this installation schedule. Drastically distinct from one another in their particular narratives and material insights, they do share a common thread of commentary on the architecture around human beings; Sandra's is invested in a metaphorical architecture of memory and psychological spaces, while Kristin's directly engages the physical structures of the labyrinth neighborhoods we inhabit.
Sandra's space, which she titled "The Persistence of Memory" is driven most by her personal connection with family and home. She lived in Tamaulipas, Mexico until she was 14, when her family moved to Texas. The displacement of home, what was then versus what has become, resonates in the raw, fading imagery of self and family portraiture. The active premise of her show, however, is that we are privileged only so much visual recollection. We have to write it down in order to retain it. Or do we? She encourages us to share a memory of our own on pieces of rice paper that she adhered to a pillar and which we may or may not fold up and put inside hollow clocks hung in the space. Our secrets are out, and one labors a bit in choosing which memory is the most 'cherished'. Intentionally or not, Sandra has created a latent tension in this opportunity; after all, she will conceivably read all these notes. How will she deal with the aftermath of this? How could our memories mean anything to her? There is something poignant and defeating in the re-reading of an anonymously written memory, and I hope this is something she considers for future work.
Walking into her installation, I was struck by how sparse it was. We have to ask how can one portray an essence of memory in a visual installation? At a first glance, Sandra's fairly conventional use of the space as a 'gallery space' is uncluttered; it seems almost too easy to be in, contrary to the way memory is constantly changing, never stagnant, and impossible to pin down. To title one's work after one of the most recognizable paintings in the world (Dali's) is a loaded decision, but Dali's goal in his was to discredit the conditions of reality and reassert the unlikely 'reality' of the dream. Sandra's installation affirms reality more than anything: she invites our immediate participation by writing on the papers. The hanging clocks in her room, if they are in reference to Dali, are reverential but are at risk of becoming too literal. The clocks point to the passing of time and are humorous if we read them as a kind of signifier of time, but can this be communicated in other ways?
Sandra uses words and images equally to talk about memory in her piece. In "Ways of Seeing", author John Berger wrote "we only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice...what we see is brought within our reach". If this is true, can we say the inverse: What we do not see is constantly escaping our reach? A truly convincing visual commentary on memory can use this condition effectively. By its nature, memory is always evading us. It is never brought within reach; yet almost everything in Sandra's installation is. However, Sandra does make our being explicit, and this is another quality of memory, since memory is always bound to a subject. It always converges back to the one with the memory. By being asked to write our memories down we are subjected to her eye.There is also the issue of the photographs themselves, and we cannot get past Sandra's images without conjuring Roland Barthes' reflections on photography in his book "Camera Lucida", in which he writes that "the return of the dead" is inherent in every photograph. Her focus on her grandmother is in line with this and there is an uncanny moment that occurs when one's eye goes from the commercially manufactured clocks in the room to the image of the clock in the photograph of her grandmother.
A sense of anonymity is at play in Kristin's installation as well. There are no signs in the world she has created; there is no language at all. It is almost as if the space she is presenting is some alternate pre-lingual dimension. But, Slavoj Zizek says in his film "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema", "We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we truly are." This is helpful in illuminating how Kristin's exhibit, as a fiction, immediately makes us subjects in it. One of the central twists is in the basic fact of its condition: we step from the city of Philadelphia into an art school and into the 'sanctuary' of an art studio, only to find ourselves back within that cumbersome urban network once more. This is very keen, but the one disruption to this quality is in the way Kristin leaves the back end of the studio fairly empty and unlit; we are directed into the other half of the room where the action is. We can always keep one foot in and one foot out.I see parallels with Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, a work about the psychological gulfs resulting from living in a world of rooms: one space separated from another space. This is a problem for us, which Kristin highlights by making her structures so distant and fragmentary. Made almost entirely in black tape which Kristin transforms into a semi illusionistic depiction of buildings, highways, steps and windows, the urban space is devoid of any literal human qualities. We are strangers within a cold, surgically descriptive place.
By using cut tape, Kristin has all but eliminated the signs of her hand. The preciousness of the artist-hand is undone. It is rather in the referencing of our being within this world that the work takes shape. The fragility of the tape speaks to Kristin's thoughtfulness on the ever present risk of being in a place that might suddenly all collapse. We live within and depend on the foresight of engineers, architects and construction workers and rarely question it: our being within a space is inevitably just so; her installation engages this. She expresses joy in disorienting the viewer and getting lost herself, and responds to the abandoned, uglier faces of Philadelphia. Ending my talk with her, she voiced a desire to bring something playful out of the darker problems inherent in many American cities. I look forward to seeing her do this and hope she critically engages the many facets of her project.
IN THEORY will be here for the next series of MFA installations. Do not forget to send ideas for other postings. We encourage your submissions!
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland, 'Camera Lucida', Hill and Wang, 1980
Berger, John, 'Ways of Seeing', Penguin, 1972
Zizek, Slavoj, 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema', Dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006
No comments:
Post a Comment