|
 |
CORNER PIECE
By Bill Arning
Published in ; Son et Lumiére, MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER, 2003
Corner Piece--The Space Between Us (2000)
Sound and Light installation
Ann Lislegaard's Corner Piece, - The Space Between Us is in the form of a Son et Lumiére, a prerecorded soundtrack and moving lights emanating from a set-like reconstruction of an anonymous room. Visitors enter this carpeted corner and hear a woman's voice, speaking in an excited whisper, echoing, and over-talking herself, punctuated by irregular longer pauses. In a jumble of words a female speaker describes in obsessive detail the activities and appearance of another woman in a space exactly like the one we are in.
As the light oscillates along with the soundtrack and the white screen-like expanse of wall becomes illuminated, the experience is akin to cinema of a highly non-imagistic sort. At first the narrator's language sounds as if she is describing a cryptic passage in a film, some unclear yet mesmerizing actions that might be explained later. "She leaves the picture, she opens the door." There are descriptions of it being a hot summer day, like the shooting description for an establishing shot in a film script. In the tradition of great film doublings such as Kim Novak in Vertigo, it is unclear whether the object and subject are one, two or more, and where visitors fit into their visual game - interloper, bystander or witness.
As our narrator's fascination with her prey deepens she lingers on what her object is wearing "Brown leather shoes, jeans, a white shirt and a dark pullover." What is the nature of this obsession, erotic, criminal or just esthetic? Her comment "I like her voice; I like her words" seems less an expression of friendship than the stalker's fantasized emotional relationship.
The environment itself is doubled; this corner is always installed in front of a second "realer" corner. This is the artifice of staged reality, in which events have only occurred when they are reenacted before others, and a fragment of a room can appear perfectly real when filmed. To stand within Corner Piece is to hover at the juncture point between lived and cinematic reality.
|
|