reviews

'Unfixed Landscape' - Is it possible to define "place" through artistic practice?

Journal of Artistic Research Reviews

'Unfixed Landscape' Is it possible to define "place" through artistic practice? is an innovative exposition in its choice of subject matter (an alternative community) to explore a personal and collective experience of place, as well as in its choice of the experiential as a material source for the research. Its quality lies in the way it weaves together various artistic research approaches in relation to its subject matter, as well as in the self-reflexivity of its engagement.
The exposition allows the various elements of the artist’s work to be seen

in relation to each other in a manner that demonstrates a wider area of engagement that is unlikely to be made visible to this extent through a standard exhibition format. The visuals are striking, being neither a portrait in the traditional sense of neither the word, nor a visual documentation in the documentary sense. The image-based work and the research at large hover in-between the two, facilitating a fascinating journey back and forward between the highly subjective and the social, between the philosophical and the anthropological.

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Harra Laakso

The submission is interesting and relevant in its subject matter (and displays a certain artistic integrity in its approach – which is no small feat). There undoubtedly exist many other similar projects but I find it to always be of value and interest to examine the changes to our communities in the globalized world, and to explore the ways in which the experience of those communities can be visually and aurally performed in a nuanced way. The question of speed and slowness in relation to place is a pertinent vantage point (and a research area) here, as places never exist without duration. In fact, I think that the use of "moving stills" (and slowed down video) is an apt description of that tension. Likewise, the exposition as a whole creates a rich interplay between elements that are seen or unseen, visible or invisible, clearly represented or inchoate.

In my view the submission does expose practice as research in a successful way. The main questions and themes are clearly set (that is, the representa-tion, in many technical forms, of a slow community and the artist-researcher's own relation to it and its inhabitants). The three case studies seem motivated and provide a rich range of approaches. The different elements create a vivid and nuanced depiction of various individual responses to places, often providing small but sufficient social clues (sometimes beyond the immediate community - e.g. the Joy Division song heard and Bob Dylan inspire this), which help to create strong atmospheres from a limited set of variables. The "stories" seem at one and the same time individual, personal and unique and sharable on a wider scale (which, I suppose, should be one general aim in artistic research).

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Henric Benesch

What seems to be at stake here is the crucial matter of the how, why and who in terms of representation of place. Artistic issues that have been with us for a long while and most certainly will continue to be with us in the future as a seemingly endless resource of artistic challenges and reflexions. In “Moving Stills” these issues are approached in multiple ways. It involves a return to a community/place and the challenge to respond to and represent this community/place in a “tactile non-verbal way” by means of various methods such as walks/talks (audio recordings and photographs), slow still shots (Moving Stills), phenomenological written accounts and drawing (a map). Altogether the work brings notions such as visibility and invisibility (Ranciere) into mind, where the various positions taken as well as the various techniques (or methods) applied not only make certain (and different) things visible which otherwise might not be visible (but then again render-

-ing others things invisible). In all there is a methodological richness, more generous than rigorous, which still manages to represent the subject in a polyphonic (spoken as well as unspoken) way, which I think we all recognize in our muddled experience of space and places. The work that draws its momentum from the impossibility of representing the “other” (Levinas). The artist’s past in the community/place in question further on brings the notion of “closeness” (and distance) to our attention. When are we too close and when are we too far away (in order to be able to represent something)? I think the real challenge and resource in this exposition is how to deal with closeness. A notion suggesting an alternative ontological point of departure than (within the sciences) well established notion of distance (or infinite distance as in “objectivity”).

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'Moving Stills' - Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon
13 April - 2 June 2012

The Visual Artists' News Sheet
CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT | July - August 2012

The gallery at the top of the stairs contained four video projections on loops, two positioned side-by-side the length of the space, and two others asymmetrically facing each other on walls at either end of the room. The second gallery displayed a series of other short video pieces, again on a loop and a wall of research material relating to a new work in development entitled Autowalks.

In the first gallery the two projections arranged side by side were of a moving 'still' shot of a young man facing the camera. Next to it was an opaque image of greenery shot though what looked like thick plastic. On the left, and adjacent to this pair of I images was a projection of a dilapidated, wooden caravan and an old converted truck with bright red and blue peeling paint. Trees are visible in the background and the surrounding grass is overgrown. The fourth projection on the opposite and far wall was of a young boy, again looking directly at the camera.

In Britain, from the 1970S - 1990s there was a loose movement of people, arising out of the hippie movement, who chose to opt out of an advanced consumer culture, live in squats and travel from music festival to fair with the desire to live closer to nature, in vans busses and converted trucks. Many moved to Ireland and Europe. Wallis's family arrived in the Burren in the West of Ireland in the late 1980s, joining others-who had settled there a decade earlier. The artist uses the word "Utopian" to describe the community where she grew up, describing how people were "nurturing vegetables, building simple, handmade and small dwellings from recycled materials”(2).

Wallis has been photographing her family and friends within this community since 2003 when she; produced a series of large format portraits for her degree show at GMIT called 'Ordinary Moments', followed by a series entitled 'Cooloorta Walks'. With 'Moving Stills', Wallis continues to explore her past at a remove. She calls it "experiential research on collective experience of place". (3) In her work there is an awareness of the challenges faced when working with material that is intimately related to her own personal story and memories. The view from inside the poly-tunnel acknowledges, perhaps, the difficulties of seeing clearly, the impossibilities of certainty. Likewise, the aging and peeling caravans seem to belie the notion of a utopia.

In the two portraits of the young man and the boy, the gaze is held; there is stillness, apart from eye movements, a slight swaying of the body and of foliage moving in the wind in the background. The simplicity and purity of these two films remind me of the early Lumiere shorts, some of which were family portraits. Wallis's project is philosophical in intention. Her interest in phenomenology, in philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, is clear from material posted on the wall in Autowalks and from her website (4). Merleau-Ponty returns to the body and embodiment as a way of being in the world (5). The face-to-face encounter is, for Levinas, an epiphany, a privileged phenomenon,' (6) a realisation of radical difference and strangeness. For Levinas, the 'other' cannot become an object of knowledge, and cannot be reduced to the ‘I’.

The work in the second gallery is called Autowalks. Here, Wallis has invited members of the community to walk with a camera in a geographical space describing the place they feel most comfortable or uncomfortable in. One of the walks takes place at night-time, allowing a particular kind of physical connection to the environment to and the sensory experiences of sound and smell This is about collective memory, the secret places we connect to, especially as children, where we feel at home and safe. This work is altogether more informal and freer than 'Moving Stills': wandering, mapping and tracing connections and lines of kinship, revealing intimate testimony and introspection.

Notes
1. Artist statement
2. Artist statement
3. Artist statement
4. www.rubywallis.com/phd.html
5. "...by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall rediscover yourself, since; perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as its were, the subject of perception" from Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, 2002, Routledge, London, 239
6. Emmanuel Levinas http:// mythosandlogos.com/Levinas.html

Vivienne Dick is a filmmaker artist based in Galway. Retrospectives of her work have taken place at the Crawford Gallery (2009) and Tate Modern (2010)

Circa - January, 2011

Ruby Wallis's Auto Promenades video and sound installation in the Galway Arts Centre presents two versions of Salthill's beloved prom. On one screen we see a video of the artist swimming through the bay with the prom and the walkway in sight. The view of the swimmer is juxtaposed with a series of accounts from participants who describe their experience of Galway and the prom while walking the length of the prom. The accounts explore notions of 'otherness' and boundaries. There is a sensual quality to the video, with the water and sounds of the swimmer's effort drawing the viewer into their personal battle with the waves. The climactic sense of journey contrasts nicely with the epiphanical experiences of our other speakers who, in considering their previous adventures, reach a kind of understanding of their place in the world.

There is an important account of scattering a friend's ashes at an unmarked burial ground for unbaptised babies by a woman in the local area. Themes of adventure run concurrently with feelings of displacement, both within the self and society. We get the idea that through analysing the littoral issues of the self we come to accept our role. Our place-ment becomes simply our place. Through making sense of the deliberate action of journey, Wallis' practice demonstrates the artist, participant and viewer as 'psychogeographer' of their own experience.

The Irish Times - November 17, 2010
Aidan Dunne

"[Ruby's] thoughtful work reminds us that the edge is a psychological state as much as a geographical or economic one."

Circa - No. 119, Spring, 2007 Katherine Waugh

Local photographer Ruby Wallis, in her show Other Madonnas in GAC, builds on an already substantial body of work documenting alternative and tangential communities, on this occasion with a series of photographs of single mothers with their daughters. Avoiding the tendancy towards voyeurism or the kind of fetishism of disenfranchised groups you often find with social documentarians like Richard Billingham, Wallis focuses instead on the subtle dynamic which exists between mother and child, allowing it to occupy its own space in the frame. Tenderness, pride, obstinacy, antagonism, all emerge from the sensitive compositional arrangements.