Niamh O’Malley
b. 1975, Ireland
The work consists of a video projected onto a painted canvas. The image is constructed through the precise alignment of a projected image and its painted counterpart. Two contrasting temporal frames – the stillness of painting and real-time filmic space – are combined. In this work, the notion of landscape as a framing device and as a mediated or distanced experience of a visual is enhanced. The interior of the scene will be painted onto the canvas, including the windowsill, window frame, curtains and house plants. When overlaid with the projection, the painting heightens the sense of construction, proximity and stillness, while the exterior of the scene remains raw projected video. The video plays in real time. The trees seen through the window move in the strong wind, while shifting sunlight periodically lights up both the painted part of the canvas and the exterior view.
In my work there is often a double framing – in other words, a marked and intended reproduction of the real production, an acknowledged representation of a representation. There is the potential for an incursion of unreality into a real world alongside a sense of distance and disappointment in the nature of the chimera. The illusionist qualities are laid bare in the work as the video fades to reveal the painting and the projector is set low on the floor to allow the viewer to pass in front of the beam. The canvas sits leaning against the wall rather than hanging so it is affirmed as an constructed object rather than a painted window.
(Text: OPEN e v + a catalogue, 2005)
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