A dark noise

‘A dark noise’, installation view, 2006.
Courtesy: gtGallery.
featuring works by Martina Corry, Allan Hughes and Susan MacWilliam.

REVIEW

Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast
16 September – 19 October

Reviewed by:

A dark noise is an accumulation of heat-generated electrons in a sensor photosite (the fundamental part in a digital camera sensor) – and its snow-like appearance may be reduced by image calibration that is said to “lead to aesthetic improvement”¹. Four DVD installations, eleven luminograms, four posters and one stereoscope were chosen by Peter Richards, the multitalented gallery director, around the theme of the narrative in relation to various interferences.

Allan Hughes chose dense inwardness to examine the authority of the recorded voice. Relating his video Two Channel Exorcism (psychogenic audition) to mainstream cinema, namely the scene in The Exorcist where the demon voice is dubbed over Regan’s dialogue, the artist aims at coercing the viewer to be a part of the presentation, a task not available in a cinema. I respond, excluded and doubtful, to the composition of two monitors engaged in an intimate/secretive conversation. The ‘what’ of epistemology is central to this work. My comprehension and doubts not only turn into intense curiosity, but become a force that keeps me longer at those strange sounding screens.

The ‘knowing that’ forges a dominant key to Martina Corry’s camera-free luminograms. She draws sublime black and white compositions with light in a dark room. Her use of a ‘new born’ light, as opposed to the ‘old light’ of normal photography, defines these images as being of nothing but themselves. She tells only one story, but what a story; that the subject of an image is that image, which moreover is the object to hold. In one act, she creates the real, the thought and the made (with reference to Karl Popper’s Three Worlds). This simultaneity brings forth a tremendous aesthetic force.

Susan MacWilliam’s intoxication with nature, life, art and magic is contagious. Explaining magic to Mercer (2005) charms the soul by the responses to sophisticated adult talk by a five-year-old absorbed in drawing. The incongruity does not lead to a joke; on the contrary, it strips the ‘how we know’ bare. Both printed (the artist’s) and spoken (Mercer’s) words are related to earlier works investigating connections between visibility and invisibility. One of them, Dermo Optics (2006), is a result of recording sessions in the Centre d’Information de la Couleur in Paris. Overwhelmed by the information on eyeless sight and fingertips vision, MacWilliam resolved to transfer that feeling to the viewer. She subtracted numerous frames (maybe ninety minutes into few seconds) to increase the subliminal vision – and, perhaps, to reduce the dark noise.
The reward is very much worth having.

INTERFACE

REVIEW

A dark noise

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