 Dutchlight 21, 2003 c-type, edition of 5, mounted on aluminium, 58 x 100 cm Siân Bonnell They Came They Came. But from where? They have arrived. But at where? They are here. But where is that? Where are we when we first glimpse these translucent presences? Certainly it is as if we have just come across them, encountered them unexpected in the crepuscular thicket, half-hidden by the damp grass or leafmould, or been mystified by their cold clarity on the crisply frozen turf. As if: that is, we know they are fictions, set-ups, staged arrangements. To turn Coleridge's famous prescription on its head, we are tricked momentarily into an involuntary "suspension of disbelief". Film and photography are unlike theatre or performance in precisely this respect: we are screened from the sound, smell and atmosphere of the contingent, the actuality of things, by the silver chemistry of the process and the lucent surface of the presentation. "Willing" or not, we believe, however momentarily, in what is, transparently, an artifice. This is what happens "at the pictures", and the "special effects" of the most advanced technologies of visual trickery have not enhanced the magic of that moment of belief. Every old sci-fi B movie could work the effect, and what is especially surprising is that it can happen again and again, not only in the cinema's dark Platonic cave, but in re-runs in the corner of the lighted living room. Our recognition of the effects (at each re-visit, each review) adds something else: a complex irony. Not the easy irony of amusement at our "seeing through" the transparent trickery, even as we enjoy its effects; rather, the deeper sense of reality conceived as multiple, compounded of what is perceived, what is known, what is remembered and what is imagined. The actual is but a portion of the phenomenal, and the imagination comprehends both in its creative transformations of the world as given. Contradictions, oppositions, ambiguities are the solvents of the unconscious, out of which an imagery emerges in dreams and reveries, an oneiric imagery that has its origins in that faculty that Coleridge called "fancy": "a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space" but dependent upon the laws of association. These images of Siân Bonnell's are indeed fanciful' in this sense, as well as having that deeper imaginative reality. These weirdly luminous arrivals from somewhere else are at once strange and strangely familar. These transfigured colanders, jelly moulds, plates and glasses, emancipated from a familiar order, alienated from the domestic, have landed in the domain of art, but of somewhere beyond the secondary worlds of still life and landscape. Alive with an inner light, like fire or ice, they have come to inhabit a region at the back of the mind. They will not easily go away. (Mel Gooding, 2003) 25 June - 26 July 2003 Hours: Mon-Fri 10 am - 6 pm, Sat 11 am - 4 pm Hirschl Contemporary Art 5 Cork Street GB-London W1S 3LQ Telefon +44 (0)20 7495 2565 Mail hirschl@dircon.co.uk www.hirschlcontemporary.co.uk |
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