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Maria Marshall, ‘Cyclops’, film still, two-channel projection, sound, colour, camera original: 35mm, 2001-2002.
Site Gallery, Sheffield 8 June – 20 July
Reviewed by: David Kennedy
Maria Marshall's video When I grow up, I want to be a cooker showed her two-year old son apparently smoking a cigarette. The carefully constructed image, shown here as a night-time projection on Site Gallery's exterior window, not only mocks the belief that the camera never lies but also explores how our own looking may be equally constructed, in this case by moral indignation. 'Fine Lines', her enthralling first British solo show, questions whether we can trust what we see in three large-scale looped film projections, each with the hypnotic strangeness of recurring dreams.
In When are we there? a camera moves into a forbidding environment of power, leading the viewer into the shadowy corridors of a Kubrick-inspired institutional hallway. The camera reaches a room where Marshall stands motionless, yet as the camera scans her body closely, something appears to move under her skin. Another work, I should be older than all of you, shows a young boy lying in a compartment inside a larger box wriggling with snakes. The boy looks anxiously to the camera positioned directly above as the reptiles threaten to enter his compartment.
Cyclops, Marshall's new work for this show, uses a split-screen and a pre-programmed computerised crane which controls a 35mm camera. On one screen, a child stands in an empty room, on the other, Marshall – the boy's mother – stands in a similar space, accompanied only by the deafening soundtrack of the Cyclops-crane. Marshall remains motionless, lit in a variety of ways from strobe to barely visible. The child, remaining harshly lit, at one point shakes his head half pleading, half warning. Cyclops makes clear that Marshall uses children to evoke the spectator's own vulnerability and the mixture of fascination and threat that surrounds our earliest experiences; her moving cameras mime the complex mental processes involved in looking and seeing.
Writer detail:
DAVID KENNEDY
is a Sheffield-based writer.
Venue detail:
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