A Time and a Place

by Rachel Davies
A solo film and video exhibition
Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London, UK
December 1-23, 2004
Venue website: http://www.kingston.ac.uk/picker/.

Reviewed by Aparna Sharma
Film Academy, University of Glamorgan

aparna31S@netscape.net

The performance to launch artist Rachel Davies’s exhibition of film and video work at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University was a quiet but intimidating experience, throwing the audience into constant disarray. In a short walk from the Kingston station to the gallery, the audience was unsure between being viewer or witness to the ‘everyday scenarios’ that dotted the journey. While the performers melded indistinguishably with the landscape, they, like some of the other passers-by particular to a suburban, nouveau riche neighbourhood, drew attention to their peculiar actions, hinting to the viewer she is implicated in an act of performance. The walk meandered through fertile moments of utter and edgy confusion.

Through this confusion, Davies evoked a sense of displacement that corresponds with the underlying sentiments of her films. Consequent to the walk, the films exhibited at the gallery transcended from being purely autobiographical, resonating with the audience a close encounter. This facilitated viewer identification with Davies’ work in which the individual’s relationship to the urban environment is a recurrent theme. However, at the gallery, the sense of displacement became exaggerated, assuming a different dimension given that the viewer did not navigate easily but was required to move in step with the exhibited film loop that comprised a sequence projected in different spaces of the gallery, some more dark than the others. A tension surfaced as the viewer’s inhabitation of the gallery space and engagement with the film loop emerged as tightly regulated, an aspect one is less accustomed to while interacting with moving image within the gallery context.

This tension fractured the distinction between the inside and outside landscapes, making the two coincide in sentiment, urging in the viewer speculation around how spaces provoke responses. This overlap is crucial for appreciating Davies’ films. It parallels the flow between the inside and outside that her work is a response to: sites and spaces propelling new narratives, emotions and senses of time emulated in her films, which through their choreography and movement dynamics rework and project deeply intimate encounters back into the public space.

At the same time, there is a recognizable distinction, nearly a contrast, in the sense of movement in the performance space and that which the films evoke. Movement during the walk by its very nature and in the gallery due to the dictation of the film loop, was clearly unidirectional. Though Davies employs a tightly choreographed camera in her films, camera movements through deeply deliberated editing and in interaction with multi-layered soundscapes cause a feeling of chaotic movement, movement that spills into differing directions. It is almost as if the camera assumes a corporeal dimension that is both bodily and emotive. This is most vividly evoked in Hong Kong to Hull, So We Went Dancing, and We Got Old. Through this distinction in movement, the viewer is subtly distanced from the work. This distancing is favourable, as the viewer is reinscribed into her position and, more importantly, allowed space to respond to the work.

This distancing peaked as the film loop concluded with A Time and a Place, a short piece in which pre-recorded images of the sites where the performers had performed were used. Earlier in the evening as viewers had gathered and awaited at the gallery before the loop was projected, images of the backgrounds, without the performers, were screened chronologically. Without sound and in succession, they had appeared candid and simultaneous with the walk, ‘triggering memories and mapping the journey undertaken’. However, in A Time and a Place, through the intervention of sound and the performers, that sequence, which the audience had shared too, was completely reconstituted into a distinct and contained narrative, far removed from the viewer in the gallery, constituting a different temporal experience. It made a fitting conclusion to the performance, leaving one with a sense of performance as pervasive.

In its entirety, A Time and a Place is an exhibition that confronts the viewer dispassionately with a confusion that is thought-provoking. While ethically there is much to debate pertaining to the distinction between performance and ‘reality’, not readily available here, but there is a deeper, more rich reworking between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, unpacked at numerous levels. A Time and a Place brims with a playful energy that usefully confuses definitions and disturbs the viewer.

For more in-depth analysis of Rachel Davies’s films, see Martha Blassnig’s review in Leonardo Reviews, January 2005.