David Spriggs: The Architecture of Illusion

Transparency is also a medium of illusion. Since 2000, Montreal artist David Spriggs has been painting and drawing on transparent sheets of Mylar to create what he calls “Spatial Image Sculpture.” This body of work is characterized by large Plexiglas vitrines that resemble specimen cabinets and contain uncanny, seemingly three-dimensional images reminiscent of holograms or specimens preserved and floating in formaldehyde. Spriggs’s images, however, are neither chemical nor digital and if from some angles the vitrines appear to contain objects with volume and depth, from other angles they appear to dissolve entirely. 

Spriggs studied painting in art school but like many young artists felt constricted by the limitations of his chosen medium. While considering the conventions of perspective he began to speculate on the possibility of being able to make marks in real space instead of on a single surface plane. He began to tackle the problem of painting “architecturally” – analyzing phenomena in terms of plans and elevations in order to “construct” images in real space. He conceives of a typical Spatial Image Sculpture as a sequence of transparent vertical elevations, where, after selecting a subject, he proceeds to section it, as many as a hundred times (depending on the depth he wishes to suggest), representing each section with a sheet of clear Mylar on which he records the subject’s topographical information. Each sheet of transparent Mylar diffuses and softens detail, generating a murky haze and making it sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible, to see through to the other side. He suspends his inscribed Mylar sheets from the four corners of their rigid glass vitrines with small coiled springs. The basic mechanics that these springs reveal generate an odd visual energy, recalling, as they do, heating coils or even turnbuckles – creating tension and pulling the centre to the corners of the vitrine both literally and figuratively – the diaphanous layers of Mylar contrasting markedly with the mechanical support structure of the springs and the angular cabinetry. 

In his Spatial Image Sculpture Spriggs has developed two distinctly different ways of recording a subject’s physical information, producing dramatically different results. He uses air-brushed monochromes to describe the substance of volumes, or alternatively, he analyses a volume by tracing its edges with black contour lines – a descriptive system reminiscent of topographical mapping. With the airbrush he is able to create the illusion of substance while giving the subject a soft unfocussed outline – contributing to the characteristic appearance of something floating in a cloudy liquid. By contrast, where he chooses to render his subjects by mapping their contours, the result is abstracted and schematic. These contour renderings record volumetric information and present it in space, simultaneously suggesting and denying three-dimensionality and making it possible to both see and to see through a volume. The resulting images have a diagrammatic character that recall exploded graphic anatomical and mechanical manuals and aids.

Within his chosen medium David Spriggs has explored a variety of imaging genres. The optical characteristics of the Spatial Image Sculptures provide him with the uncanny ability to describe specific phenomena and to conjure dramatic abstract effects. He variously works naturalistically, where the subject matter lends itself ideally to the medium, or expressively and abstractly, adopting the properties of the medium to generate subjects and approaches that recall art historical genres. Spriggs exploits the natural tendency of the transparencies to cloud by employing the airbrush to create soft semipermeable masses that merge seamlessly with each subsequent layer of Mylar. Thus the Spatial Image Sculpture seems ideally suited to representing clouds and cloud-like imagery such as in his Archaeology of Space, 2008; Abstract Object, 2007; Entropy, 2007; White Space, 2004; and Perceptible Consciousness, 2001. 

Similarly, when Spriggs moves away from white airbrushed clouds, he finds other subjects with similar characteristics that respond to the specific properties of his media. By changing from white paint to black he transforms his billowy white clouds into dense clumps of smoke in Dark Matter, 2007, where dark clouds may ominously suggest the smoke from a chemical fire or a corrupted liquid. In Blood Nebulae, 2002, Spriggs adopts the microscopic image of haemoglobin as a subject, where giant red blood platelets appear to float in a thick plasma, and in the piece In-Utero, 2001, a tiny pink baby appears to swim in a cloudy amniotic fluid.

Spriggs also explores a type of figurative expressionism through the use of non local colour in Incorporeal Movement, 2004, where the layered multiple image sequence of a body in motion is rendered in a brilliantly sanguine red. Similarly, white is used expressively where its effect makes the human portrait ghostly in Immaterial, 2001. An early work, Omniscient Spectator, 2000, is characterized by its expressionistic subject matter, when the artist’s precise analytical contour mapping describes a huddling and emaciated figure. By contrast Containment, 2007 and Fragmented Figure, 2000, evidence an Impressionistic approach, where rough, linear, free-hand renderings of the subjects provide just enough information for one to be able fill in the blanks and complete the three-dimensional image.

Spriggs’s impatience with two dimensional media developed from his interest in rendering images that more directly engaged time, space and movement. He found a reflection of these interests in the work of the Cubists and Futurists, who addressed issues of speed, time and space in paintings, collages, sculptures and in various manifestos around the turn of the previous century. Images such as The Aesthetics of Speed, 2005 and Incorporeal Movement, 2004, feature multiple layered profiles and suggest, for example, the influence of a Cubo-Futurist painting such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2), 1912.1 Similarly, in The Fall of Modernism, 2005, Spriggs adopts one of Cubism’s favourite still life subjects, the guitar, to describe the movement of an object in space. The falling musical instrument is rendered with a staccato rhythm of contour lines that make reference to the fragmented planes of the Cubists, and may alert us to the discordant sound which we anticipate will accompany the guitar’s inevitable crash to earth. And in the work Abstract Object, 2007, Spriggs shows the influence of the Futurists enthusiasm for velocity and power in art through his rendering of this comet-like form.2  

  

The influence of Cubism on Spriggs is also evident in The Paradox of Power, 2007, where the artist adopts one of Picasso’s favourite subjects, the bull. This major work features the image of an upside-down bull, rendered motion-like with the layering of overlapping profiles. The image is split down the middle, with the left realized in blue and the right in red. Spriggs has chosen to problematize the symbol of male power and aggression by suspending the beast harmlessly, as if the animal was struggling to free itself from its powerless and undignified position, as well as through his seemingly arbitrary blue/red colouring – a sly reference to his own power to create illusions.3  

Spriggs distances himself from art historical models when his subject matter reflects back knowingly on his media’s eccentricities. In Progress, 2006, he uses his contour mapping approach to reflect on the logic of his own layered system of representation with his description of the complex internal mechanics of an escalator. In Still-Life, 2003, an image that looks as though it may have been created by an X-Ray surveillance device, Spriggs speaks to the issue of a type of invasive transparency which we recognize may not be universally desirable. 

Walls are built to preserve privacy -- to separate what we feel is the legitimate business of others and of what is not. We maintain barriers to preserve mystery, where the banal mechanics of the thing somehow seem to do its larger meaning and significance a disservice. We draw curtains to preserve dignity, when the display of an individual’s vulnerability is considered an unwarranted invasion. David Spriggs work demonstrates that in transparency there is neither absolute clarity, fidelity nor morality. Transparency is as capable of generating illusions as it is in revealing truth. 

Gordon Hatt, October 2008

Endnotes

1. Duchamp was in turn inspired by the early stroboscopic photographic motion studies of Étienne Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. See Katherine Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists, New York: 1962. 

2. Giacomo Balla & Fortunato Depero, The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, 1915. “Balla initially studied the speed of automobiles, thus discovering the laws and essential line-forces of speed. After more than twenty exploratory paintings, he understood that the flat plane of the canvas prevented him from reproducing the dynamic volume of speed in depth. Balla felt the need to construct, with strands of wire, cardboard sheets, fabrics, tissue paper, etc., the first dynamic plastic complex.”

3. The blue/red colouring is a reference by Spriggs to 3-D glasses and the anaglyphic system of rendering stereoscopic images. Spriggs also sees the colours symbolically, with the red representing the physical and the embodied and blue representing the immaterial and abstract.

Plastic Shit

Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit . . .

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984

On the face of it, Milan Kundera’s declaration that kitsch is the denial of shit appears wrong. Kitsch, after all, IS shit. It’s all that cloying, mewling, cutesie crap found in gift shops and tourist strolls, all those visual gags of dogs playing cards and mechanical singing fish for sale at the hardware store, and those maudlin Elvis busts and Diana icons and acres of knick-knacks on the shelves at Value Village. For Kundera, what makes all that stuff kitsch, and not art (or at least not art with a capital “A”) is that it is missing a vital organic element. Kitsch, for Kundera, is art removed of life’s messy bits: pain and suffering, hunger and sorrow, decay and waste. Kundera’s kitsch is a sanitized art of Pollyannaish desire that wants nothing to do with the more disturbing parts of our existence. It just wants to be liked. Excessively needy and too willing to please, its lack of shit overwhelms it, and it becomes what it lacks. Kitsch becomes shit.

In recent years, Toronto-based artist Katharine Harvey has been creating sculptural installations using plastic packaging and cheap dollar-store items – materials and merchandise that are intended only for a single or limited use or for the stimulation of momentary sentiment – things which, having passed only briefly through the stage of utility, are destined to quickly become refuse, stuff we tend to call shit. Harvey’s fascination with this material came from her experience as a painter trying to capture the fleeting reflections and refractions of water. Her investigations into water’s infinitely variegated visual qualities led her to a remarkably similar phenomenon found in the reflections of store windows. She was drawn to those curious, older, family-operated stores whose windows display an accumulation of dusty unsold gift items and bric-a-brac. Viewed from different angles, the windows featured a parade of curios suspended between the reflections of the activity on the street and glimpses into the store’s interior. Flattened first through the working photograph and secondly through painting and glazing, Harvey’s Storefront paintings became liquid spaces in which inside and outside flowed into each other, punctuated by a dream-world of floating Venetian gondolas, ballerinas on point, elaborate clocks and fancy vases.

Harvey’s Storefront paintings were elaborations on water as a metaphor of the subconscious – a diorama of submerged desires and stunted fantasies. They were also the basis for installations that used existing art gallery vitrines to assemble fantastic versions of the vernacular (Seasick , YYZ Artists Outlet, 2003; Storefront, Stride Gallery window, Calgary, 2001; To the Depths, Parts I & II, Solo Exhibition, Toronto, 2001-02). In these installations, Harvey organized dense collections of giftware and costume jewellery by tone and hue, and in the process created a series of impressionistic tableaux that deflected attention from the individual objects. The collections of spectrally shifting coloured objects seemed to strike a familiar but minor chord, evoking those dyspeptic feelings of detachment and alienation we often experience during the Christmas season in face of a sea of pointless merchandise and hollow commercial sentiment.

During 2006 and 2007, Harvey’s media migrated from glass and ceramic giftware to plastic packaging and mass produced dollar store items. She continued her colouristic approach to assemblage, prismatically organizing the recyclable blister packing and muffin containers as a clear spray at the top of Waterfall, (Rodman Hall, 2006-07) down to the deep pools of translucent greens and deep blues of the plastic waste baskets, water bottles, dish racks and other seemingly limitless blue-green coloured plastic dollar store ephemera. In the installations Fountain (Making Room, 2006), and in the Waterfall, (Service Canada, Harbourfront, 2007), Harvey left behind her dollar-store merchandise to create impressionistic assemblages made entirely of transparent packing material – works of pure plastic froth.

Harvey's work is notable for the parallel investigations she pursued into both the optical and metaphorical qualities of her subjects and her chosen media. Her open process of free association allowed her to move from a study of the optical effects of water, to water as a metaphorical container of submerged consciousness, from an investigation into the attractions of kitsch back to the optical possibilities of colour-classified junk, and from the foamy optical character of a dense mass of polyethylene packing, back to the existential reality of a mountain of plastic shit.

One would be hard pressed to find two things materially more opposite than plastic and shit. Plastic is organically inert – a product of the petrochemical industry. Shit is fetidly natural, organic and very personal. Shit belongs to each of us individually. Plastic comes from somewhere else. Plastics are associated with cheapness and disposability. They can be easily moulded and mass-produced. They can be made flexible, elastic and paper thin or rigid and sturdy in proportion to their lightweight. Plastic can be transparent or opaque and is highly prized as an impermeable moisture barrier. All this make plastics cheaper and more adaptable than either wood, leather, cloth, ceramic, glass or metal would be used for similar purposes.

We know, however, that plastics are not as durable as organic materials and we know damn well that plastics do not decompose. Moving plastic parts break and wear out all the time and many plastic objects are just a waste – designed for limited or single usages, rendering their active life cycle shorter than that of many insects. And the passive life cycle – life after disposal – is immeasurable. While many plastics can be vaporized with intense heat, most often they avoid decomposition and continue to exist somewhere in the world: in a landfill, at the bottom of a lake or ocean, or ground up and melted down to be made into more plastic. Plastic is two times shit: first because it so often fails us and second because we are continuously in the process of disposing it.

By representing and including kitsch, plastic merchandise and disposable plastic packaging in her work, Katharine Harvey ensures that romantic sparkle and liquid shimmer is not merely a vehicle of escape, but a memento mori of our embodied subjectivity. That is the existential reality that Harvey’s work probes. As we find ourselves drowning in our own refuse, we are forced to examine our habits of consumption and production. In any dollar store, Wal Mart, Zellers, Canadian Tire or Best Buy we can see our own infantile and narcissistic desires reflected in row upon row of cheap merchandise and the mountain of plastic garbage that they generate. This stuff will never die. We will.

Gordon Hatt, 2008

Daisuke Takeya: Kara

Daisuke Takeya, Waveless Ocean, 1999, oil on wood, panel, 32 x 47"

When Daisuke Takeya asked me if I would talk about his work on the occasion of his exhibition at the Japan Foundation here in Toronto, I was a little unsure of where I would begin. Takeya is an artist whose work ranges from figurative, portrait and landscape painting to video, installation and conceptual practice. His work is informed by personal experience, social criticism and by his professional training in figurative art – concerns and considerations which at times are articulated in specific bodies of work and at other times can be seen to form threads that connect and reappear at various places in his art.

It is impossible within the limited framework of this talk to adequately address all of the threads and media which encompass the artist’s practice, and I won’t attempt to do it here. Instead, I would like to apply conventional art historical method to a close analysis of some of Takeya’s paintings over the last 15 years. This examination will deal with how the artist’s concerns as a young man were given form within the idiom of his academic figurative art training in the early 1990s. I will trace the artist’s evolving engagement with the figure and the landscape as signifiers of feeling and desire to arrive at the current body of work.

* * *

“Kara” in Japanese means “empty.” Its Kanji character also represents the word for sky, air, and space (“Sora”). Both “Kara,” and “Sora” hover above Toronto and Tokyo, as well as Ottawa, Osaka and the village of Pouch Cove, Newfoundland. It is one thing that all these places have in common. The “emptiness” or the “sky” of the Kara series of paintings can be seen to have its origins as far back as some of the artist’s early student work, where the inclusion of horizons into the backgrounds of figure studies and later as pendants to figure studies come to represent both a rhetorical and literal “emptiness.” 

In the mid 1990s, Takeya was a student at the New York Academy of Art, an art school dedicated exclusively to the study of the human figure in painting, sculpture and drawing. The study of the human figure has its roots in classical Greek art and in its Roman imitators, where the gods and goddesses of Olympus were rendered as beautiful and heroic humans wearing little or no clothing. The revival of interest in classical mythology and art during the Italian Renaissance stimulated a return to illustrating mythologies and histories with the naked figure and learning the skill required to render the nude convincingly became one of the pillars of the academic teaching of art.

The study of the human figure meant originally learning anatomy from skeletons and cadavers. In the modern era photographs are an important source for visual information about the body. But most often the study of the human figure is accomplished through that staple of art school – the life drawing class. In life drawing class, a model disrobes and strikes a pose for a predetermined length of time. The model usually stands, sits or reclines on a low riser, surrounded by students at easels or with drawing pads. Depending on the point of the class, the model may start out with quick gestural poses, and then settle into one or two extended poses. To render a “finished” figure composition convincingly from life (e.g. without recourse to photography) the model must remain in the same pose for hours or in sittings that extend over days. The pose must be something that can be held reasonably still – no extended and raised limbs, or difficult and uncomfortable positions that cause the model to move and adjust position frequently. The job of modelling is not for fidgety people. If a person is capable of relaxing into a state of torpor, they will probably make a good model and the artist will not have to constantly readjust the perspective and recast shadows. The good model is a paragon of inactivity. The good model does nothing. Just stands, sits or lies there. 

Initially, working from the model is a transgressive experience. After all, how often do we sit in a room with a naked stranger? But the unsettling nature of this situation soon gives way to the various and complex challenges of rendering accurately the perspective and proportion of the human anatomy. Combined with the study of proportion, the repetition of the practice of drawing from the model in poses of extended duration produces artists who are adept at a naturalistic representation of the human body. 

The reality of this practice of learning to draw from the figure, however, has had the inevitable effect of characterizing what we know of as figurative art. It gives us a disproportionately large number of images of a relatively narrow range of human activity and attitudes. Typically subjects recline or sit, are apparently thoughtful or vacant, sexually available or enervated and despairing because, that is what life models do best. Figurative painting can provide us with models of action, but these images are heavily dependent on photography and always betray the conventions of the lens. Painting and drawing from the figure then rely on a stationary and relaxed model and, as a convention, it tends to idealizes passivity, isolation and vulnerability.

Looking at Takeya’s early figurative work, one can see that the landscapes and environments in which he has placed his figures underscore the apparent enervation and lassitude of his models. Paintings such as Abandon, 1993, oil on linen, 81.5 x 43"; and Dead-End Street, 1994, oil on linen, 80 x 55" feature the juxtaposition of the naked figure with vacant, despoiled and dark cityscapes. These paintings don’t create believable spaces as much as they describe to us symbolic and psychological states of mind. In Abandon, the reclining figure’s legs are supported by what looks to be a pile of junk. Further examination closer to the bottom of the canvas reveals random objects that one might find in an artist’s studio, piled high, occupying almost 90% of the canvas. Above and beyond the pile of junk, is a city scape – the silhouettes of a few tall buildings against a light sky, and above that a dark low-lying cloud. In Dead End Street, a model standing in the classic contraposto position with head bowed is surrounded by road and highway barriers, a dust pan, a fire extinguisher, and a welding mask among other objects. A yellow line passes below the triangular police barrier, directing our line of vision to a horizon which is marked by a checkered yellow “Dead End” sign. The dark low- hanging cloud and the pile of junk, the “Dead End” sign, and the various street barriers, all work to signify a mood of pessimism and despair, a mood which already seems to be illustrated by the demeanor of the model.

In this early work, one is able to identify a youthful alienation expressed in the language of figurative and landscape painting – enervated figures and the bleak cityscapes are symbolic rendering of the artist’s own feelings. Takeya characterized his mood at this time as being “happy to be sad.” On the threshold of adulthood, his experience of life was coloured by a pessimism born of a personal loss and an isolation that was accentuated by the experience of studying in a foreign country, in a language and in a culture that he was just beginning to understand.

A series of diptychs produced by the artist in the late 90s ( Untitled, 1999, charcoal on paper, 56 x 40.5"; Pornography,1999, oil on linen, 64 x 88"; Waveless Ocean, 1999, oil on wood, panel, 32 x 47"; Eternal Flame, 1999, oil on wood panel, 32 x 47"), contrasts, in the right hand panel, figures in various states of repose to, in the left panel, city, sea or landscapes familiar to the artist which are comprised of 80 to 95% sky. The right-hand panels, many of which were based on life modelling sessions, are, like Abandon and Dead-End Street, rendered again in moody, dark environments that create a general feeling of languor, aimlessness or despair. Like the earlier student paintings, each figure is cloaked in shadows and revealed only by the raking light of a single source – a light bulb, a television sometimes, but most often from what appears to be a window. One can imagine that the left-hand panel may be the view outside that space, through the window perhaps, or again, psychologically speaking, a symbolization of the figure’s emotional landscape. Takeya has told me that the landscape images are of of Japanese places. Todaiji Temple in Untitled, Yokohama City in Eternal Flame,Yokosuka City in Pornography. After the gloomy cityscapes which complete the backgrounds of the earlier paintings, the big skies of the diptychs may seem bright and airy by comparison. But on further examination these big skies are overcast, or dusky or just bleakly empty. Perhaps the dark foreboding and pessimism of the earlier work has cleared up some, and become something a more manageable nostalgia, a little less heavy, and maybe the beginning of something new.

In the series of diptychs Everybody Loves You, done while he was still living in New York, Takeya continues the contrast between a big-skied landscape on the left and a figurative representation on the right. By this time, however, the figure studies have become somewhat uniform head and shoulder portraits lit by a single low frontal light. Recalling his earlier work where the figures were cloaked in shadow, the position of the light in the Everybody Loves You portraits illuminates the tip of the nose, cheekbones, and the brow, and casts heavy shadows on the rest of the head, including the bridge of the nose and the sides and top of the head. The effect, which is similar to holding a flashlight to your chin while standing in the dark, can be quite theatrical. It exaggerates contours, focuses attention on the eyes, diminishes the hair and surface quality of the skin, and in doing so de-emphasizes gender. The effect has been used in the cinema to allude to demonic possession or to an evil alter ego that may emerge after dark. But it is also associated with a type of campfire intimacy – the shared experience of being in the dark with others and the bonding in the face of uncertainty which that brings.

In other words, Takeya’s choice of lighting may be ideal for the complex topic of speaking of love, de-emphasizing gender and bringing into relief our conflicted identities and often awkward relations with friends, acquaintances and the objects of our affections. Moreover, the expression of affection, which is possibly more freely given in the United States than in Japan or even among the famously reticent Canadians, is none-the-less, universally problematic, and no amount of world travelling relieves the individual from this personal accounting: Do you or don’t you (love me), do you mean what you say (when you say “I love you”) and do you say what you feel (when you say “I love you”). 

Perhaps this ambivalence is emphasized by the left-hand panel cityscapes of the New York skyline as seen from Brooklyn. Few other skylines are as recognizable as the New York City skyline, and yet, as Takeya renders it under towering skies, he makes it seem quite ordinary, diminished in comparison to the infinite sky above, suggesting perhaps that like the famous skyline, the words “I love you,” may be just another banal social construction in the grand scheme of things. In Everybody Loves You the moodiness of the early figurative paintings and diptychs has been stripped down into a complex ambivalence. The anonymous and quiescent nudes have morphed into individuals with names – seemingly self-aware and capable of action, but perhaps also with self-identities and beliefs as insubstantial and as unformed as the sky above.

From being “happy to be sad” in the years immediately following his arrival in North America, Takeya adapted emotionally and philosophically to his new home. In his painting he pared down the conventionalized figurative representations of sadness and despair into existential mug-shot like portraits and flat, almost featureless landscapes expressing neither happiness or sadness, but a heavy, pervasive spiritual emptiness. 

The Kara series of paintings retains and enlarges the city scape with the big sky and altogether dispenses with its figurative pendant. No longer are we asked to consider the symbolic despair of the slouched model, or the identity of the flashlight-illuminated individuals. No longer does the landscape act as an exclamation mark for these figures. Depicting the skies over a number of cities and towns in Japan and Canada, each of the canvases of the Kara series measures 6 feet in height. The cityscapes in each painting occupy less than 2 per cent of the paintings’ vertical height – a proportion of sky to land even more dramatic than in the earlier work. If you watch the reactions of viewers, the natural inclination is to approach each painting in a slight crouch, in an attempt to identify the depicted city scape. Once a landmark is identified and thus the city too, the spectator feels able to stand up straight and back up from the painting to take it in whole. 

In the Kara series, questions of identity have shifted from individuals to cities and towns, but perhaps, like the head and shoulder’s portraits of Everybody Loves You which, after a time begin to seem less and less dissimilar, so too seem the cities of Osaka, Tokyo, Toronto and Ottawa when juxtaposed to the vastness of the sky above. The radical perspective of Takeya’s view of the cities which he visited and lived in, reminds one of looking at the earth from space, where countries and ethnicities and borders are invisible. When asked about the feelings behind these images, the artist responded, “I wanted to feel like air.”

The Kara series was originally painted in 2001 and 2002. Those paintings were tragically destroyed, and the current series of paintings is a recreation of the original, five years later. The discipline required to re-paint the entire series is a testament to the personal significance the works held for the artist. When asked about the inevitable difference between the paintings of five years ago and the contemporary recreations, the artist responded by saying that the current series is more colourful. This is not hard to imagine when we look at the tonality of the city scape panels of the preceding Everybody Loves You series. In Kara, the sequel, Takeya’s work has opened up. The skies begin to be less leaden and airier. A general greyness has given way to a luminous spectral range of colour ranging from sky blue to indigo, to pink and to orange. Emptiness, or Kara, at one time a burden for the Daisuke Takeya, has become a space of possibility.

Ed Pien: A Soft and Gentle Darkness

In a Realm of Others is a multimedia installation of drawing, video and slide projections. The centrepiece of the installation is a long passageway connected to a series of three circular chambers made from translucent glassine paper. Enveloping the structure is a continuous green curtain of glassine, covered with hand-painted treetops. At one end is a narrow opening leading to a passage whose curtain walls gently billow around you as you advance. At the end of the passage are the inner chambers – round curtain walls of white glassine rising to the ceiling. These walls are animated by graphic images of twisted and disfigured ghouls and demons – horrible, nightmarish figures surrounding and hovering threateningly above images of vulnerable and frightened children.

Located in the innermost structure of the installation is a video monitor showing a succession of children attempting to make scary faces and threatening noises. The video of children exploring their ideas of monsters is paralleled by a second video, outside the glassine structure, of adults recounting their personal ghost stories. The children in the video puff themselves up to become what they imagine to be frightening and monstrous. They’re cute in their play acting, and it seems they needed little prompting to mug and growl for the camera.

Being inside the enveloping structure of In a Realm of Others is an extraordinary experience. The walls transmit a diffused coloured light, and they move as you move, like a sympathetic living organism. The ink drawings of monsters are unsettling and disturbing – ghostlike, when seen through a second layer of the translucent glassine. Passing out of the inner sanctum you notice overhead a violet-mirrored image of tree tops – a sort of moving Rorschach blot – projected on a hanging disk. It is dizzying, disorientating and exciting – an intriguing and complex punctuation to a remarkable journey. I feel sad that it is over, sad to be leaving this space.

* * *

“If I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.” How strange it is to remember these words today, words I at one time recited before every bedtime. Sleeping alone in the dark would seem to be frightening enough for any child without introducing the idea of sudden death. The prayer, I now realize, was a parent’s small plea for mercy, pitched from the tiny voice of a child. Walking through the installation I find myself thinking about childhood nighttime fears, bedtime stories and prayers. Here between these satiny sheets I am reminded of the painful anxieties and candied dreams of my childhood.

Fear of abandonment, I think, may be one of the most profound traumas of childhood. Looking back, I know that it was a critical aspect of my childhood psychological development. It is easy to see how this anxiety at an early age can have profound effect on the development of character. Most people can remember the childhood anxiety of being temporarily separated from a parent in a crowed place, or being the last child to be picked up at school. For a child, the possibility of abandonment is a reality of every waking moment – living in a world that is largely mysterious, and dependent on adults for every need, monsters and demons have the potential to lurk in every closet and under every bed. Abandonment, loneliness and isolation, of course, are only places where fear begins. It is the imagination of what happens next, which is the stuff of dreams, nightmares, fairy tales and art.

Some parents tell their children fairy tales before bedtime. Stories such as the Grimms’ fairy tales “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” or the Taiwanese fairy tale “Tiger Grand Aunt,” explore childhood night fears. Passage through a dark, malevolent forest is a common metaphor in these fables. Adults in these fables are ambiguous figures – alternatively protectors and predators, nurturing parents and savage beasts. Wolves and tigers impersonate grandmothers and grand aunts. Mothers, and surrogate mothers in particular, play important roles, as symbols of the anxiety of separation and abandonment. Fundamental to the stories is the young protagonist’s success at tricking the demon; killing it and managing to successfully escape its clutches. The endings are always more or less happy.

The fairy tales that were told to me as a child, or the prayers I recited at bedtime did little to either stimulate or allay my fears of the night. A bigger factor in my falling asleep was more likely the comfort provided by a seam of light filtering through a bedroom door left slightly ajar. That light was my link to the world of the living – to the gentle clink and clatter of dishes being washed, to muted adult voices and to the resonant hum of the television still on in the living room.

* * *

I’m on the outside now, standing in the soft green glow of the glassine. Scanning the monumental image of treetops, I can almost feel them swaying and groaning in the wind. Here outside, this luminous paper giant feels strange and threatening. I turn around and go back, to feel again the thrill of moving through the maternal folds of the passageway, of the walls of light that flow magically around me. I am drawn again to the hearth-like inner sanctum, which, in changing from green to white, this time seems hotter and angrier.

In A Realm of Others seems to be an inversion. Instead of the passage leading you into darkness, like the process of falling asleep, or walking into a dense forest, going from the outside to the innermost sanctum, you pass into light. But it is not a metaphorical enlightenment to which we are drawn, rather it is as if travelling to the molten core of the earth, to the white-hot source of passion, and anxiety, to the reptilian brain of this strange creature. These kids and their monster faces and noises only teach us that we are born of fear, and that at the centre of our personality is insecurity and doubt and the trauma of separation. And as we turn to leave that bright white place and distance ourselves from the primal scream, as we talk to our therapists and begin to take control of our inner child, it is not a light we step into, rather a soft and gentle darkness.

Gordon Hatt, 2005