Initially, my summer project was going to be in response to the stimuli "here & now". After visiting Hill & Adamson at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Juliana Capes' Earthly Bodies, I considered themes of the past, present and the transitory. Wendy McMurdo's Let's Go to a Place touched on similar ideas, with digitally distorted photographs suggesting a generational tendency towards the technological, eerily glitched and yet childish in their kaleidoscope obfuscation. Similarly to McMurdo, in Julia Barbour's Reject, Respond, Repurpose the central part of the image is concealed. The images I created, though addressing time and presence, have a political element that I thought was more appropriate to "for sale".
In my pieces, an archetypal celebrity wedding photograph is manipulated into something less familiar. This was done by removing the subject from the frame (with a kitchen knife) leaving behind only the artifice and vestiture. The removal of the celebrity suggests a presence in absence, while the decorative and peripheral is brought to the foreground - personhood is revoked and what remains is product.
The empty space within these figures is then underlayed with scenes suggesting spectacle. This cut-out space breaks what is known as "the fourth wall" in cinema. The space reflects back to the viewer their role as consumer of images. In the space of the singular we find the plural. The deliberate positioning within the male and female spaces, however, posits an inequality: instead of windows and an audience, we find church architecture; in the second, the cinematographer and his camera. This brings to mind a passage from John Berger's Ways of Seeing:
“And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
And Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey:
“Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”
