Michelle Deignan: Posing as a Subject Amongst Subjects
at Maria Stenfors, London
16 July – 29 October 2011
Michelle Deignan “Microphone” (2008) Unique lambda print. Courtesy of the artist and Maria Stenfors.
Michelle Deignan’s London solo exhibition at Maria Stenfors Gallery entitled “Posing as a Subject Amongst Subjects†incorporates video installation, 16 mm film projection and photography. The installation occupies most of the exhibition space, Journey to an Absolute Vantage Point (2011) fits a two-channel video work onto a double-sided screen projection, the back-to-back videos playing off each other in treatment and in form. One side proffers a black-and-white violin, cello and piano trio performing the soundtrack of Deignan’s installation, while the other projection presents a postcard-like color shot of Berlin’s Schloss Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace) and its surroundings, the scene of the story unfolding herein.
Presumably written as a romantic spy novel, Deignan constructs a stylistic narrative, a kind of faux-documentary incorporating references to artists of the German Romantic period such as Beethoven, Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The story’s male and female protagonists are never seen onscreen, but depicted by a voice-over narrator, potentially as one would experience an audiobook version of the said novel. Ostensibly the two meet to exchange sensitive information, but as they journey through the castle grounds, their conversation turns into a sour argument. Written from the woman’s point of view and told by a female narrator, the spoken words help place the viewer behind the eyes of the woman in the park, to understand her inner voice and experience her emotional shifts. Uttered in English by a German actress, the narrator’s accent somehow provides a contrasting texture to the music’s flowing lyricism, especially composed for Deignan’s piece, which follows the woman’s anxiety and agitations to progressively reach a climaxing tango of dramatic tension.
Installation view “Journey to an Absolute Vantage Point” (2011). Courtesy of the artist and Maria Stenfors
Journey to an Absolute Vantage Point clearly attracts as much attention to its sounds than its images, filling the gallery space with impassioned rhythms and intonations together with the maudlin voice-over in full volume. The screen image of the castle and surrounding nature simply set the tone with its scenery, without revealing any visual of leading cast, all kept behind the narrative text. In fact the audio was so loud at times, that when voice and music sporadically collided into crescendos, it was almost impossible to understand the spoken words. This made for a sometimes patchy and fragmented storyline, and impacted on the tone of Deignan’s statement, on how it was perceived and remembered.
The power relationships between masculine and feminine personas so obviously place the man in a dominant position that the female character inevitably regresses to out-of-body allocutions, such as “Great ideas can be ruined by the treatment of bland observations, transformed into something meaningfulâ€. Thus, matters of ambiguity and authenticity move to the centre of the artist’s preoccupations, enclosed in a historical period tainted by the interpretations and rationalizations of the victors.
Installation view “Journey to an Absolute Vantage Point” (2011). Courtesy of the artist and Maria Stenfors
Journey to an Absolute Vantage Point doesn’t propose a narrative closure or linear solution to the predicament set in place, but instead the videos loop back to the beginning and repeat again, after reaching an arbitrary end-point. Left uncertain or perplexed, viewers may feel such opacity of meaning could trigger an emotional state akin to the figure in Casper David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog†(1817-18), as he beholds the obscure horizon, anxious of the eternal return of his buried past, forever rolling over into the present.
Michelle Deignan’s website: www.michelledeignan.info
Maria Stenfors
Unit 4
21 Wren Street
London WC1X 0HF
info@mariastenfors.com
www.mariastenfors.com