|
|
In identifying intervals between connections, the three video works in mis.com investigate the space occupied by miscommunication. The exhibition brings together works in which dialogue, as a true exchange, is caught in pensile space and rendered static. This stasis or gap can be approached as the pivotal space between reality and fiction, collision and cleavage. Engaging modes of communication and plays on histories of dialogic representation, the works in the exhibition illuminate the systems and gaming rules of human communication within the structure of the filmic frame and the implied space between frames. (But here the title calls attention to the digital distance these works have from film, creating another layer in their communicative construction).
Faltering Repetition (2000), a 360-degree video and photomontage installation by Vancouver artist Fiona Bowie, is the most experiential work of the three. Upon entering the installation the viewer is located at an intersection amid a visual, aural, nocturnal cityscape where the slow-motion interaction between two drivers stopped at a light catches us in between. We are privy to the thick, fragmented conversation and meaningless gestures of a fictionalized chance encounter, a purgatory of almost communication.
The most cinematic of the works is New York-based Lorna Simpson’s highly staged Call Waiting (1997). Referencing the mis-en-scenes of film noir, sitcom absurdity and bedroom voyeurism, Simpson’s black and white projection is an examination of telephone communication and the simultaneous distance and intimacy that the technology allows. Where Bowie references urban sprawl’s car culture and its dislocated humanity, Simpson’s interest lies in the tangled and crossed lines of communication in our multi-cultural society. Call Waiting’s characters have broken conversations in English, Punjabi, Chinese and Spanish, the layered dialects and telephone technology both binding and cleaving communications. The fractured and frustrated conversations speak to an alienation that resides in this digital moment. Fast-paced culture fosters a need to be totally connected and on the go all the time, moving us further from actual communication toward a distanced intimacy in the space between one car and another, between cell phones, keyboards or dueling cameras.
Lorna Simpson, stills from Call Waiting, 1997
|
The work that most successfully interrogates the space between communication is Sophie Calle and Gregory Shephard’s quasi-documentary work entitled Double Blind (1992). Using video simply as a recording device, this typically Calle-esque conceptual work is dryly shown on a small monitor. Both diarists, Sophie and Gregory, wield cameras in order to reveal events and conversations as they unfold during an American road trip. This footage is interspersed with voice-overs of interior monologues spoken privately into the camera to reveal insecurities, secrets and revelations. A voyeuristic interest leads one to follow this 75 minute low-drama soap opera, witnessing the true/false relationship between Sophie and Gregory. Calle’s practice tends to tread an uneasy line between appearance and deception, questioning our Lacanian self-construction in both public and private spaces and the resulting occurrences that manifest in the space between fiction and reality. Her redefinition of conceptualism through personal investigation looks at the conditions and parameters of subject and object through role-playing that elides the line between mimicry and actuality. (In Double Blind for example, Sophie and Gregory marry at a drive-thru chapel in Las Vegas. Is this a relationship truism or a performance for the sake of art?)
These pivotal moments, the spaces between archive and narration, voyeurism and exhibition, intimacy and distance, hold the works in mis.com together at the point before the intervals collapse into one, or the other, binary. Using video as an intermediary, highlighting its nature as a go-between (Double-Blind in particular is a metapicture), Bowie, Simpson and Calle present spaces where dichotomizations pause. In examining communications around sexuality, race, power and tradition, the implied desire in all three works speak to the construction of self and other and the medially occupied space therein.
|
|
|
