PORTRAIT IN TIME AND GESTURE

Dual screen installation / single screen film

“Countless layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen successively on your brain as softly as light. It seems that each buries the preceding, but none has really perished” Charles Beaudelaire

Portrait in time and gesture is a video installation which looks at the shifting presence of identity over time. The piece has been presented in two versions: as single screen ‘double exposure’ film and as a ‘triple exposure’ live installation where front and back images are projected and the middle presence is live.

Portrait gesturally explores the displacement of core identity over an individual’s history. With reference to the photographic portrait, which traditionally offers a ‘definitive’ representation of identity, Portrait looks at  moments of inconsistency, oscillations over time, by creating a body that is at once separating and re-uniting with itself, betraying feelings of self-multiplication and revealing gaps in self-perception.

Thoughts in the making

There seems to be an inherent connection between representation of identity, location and history as memory. The photographic portrait encapsulates all three. The use of moving image in the live version of Portrait enables the reproduction of captured past in real time. This idea invites a means of constructing a fictive simultaneity of different moments, juxtaposing different states of being in one same person over time.

Portrait was originally conceived with the idea of mono perspective, positioning the eye in line with the lens, in order to achieve a total synergy of two/three identities. The live installation reveals a multi-perspective, spacial quality which emphasises the uniqueness of view of each and every spectator. It also invites a feeling of disorientatation between what is real and what is recorded and what figure is guiding which.

Initially two paths of choreographed movement were created. These were based on a master sequence and a digression from that master. We then created a third path, the live one, which oscillates between the two by merging with the back or the front bodies in turn. The sound, belonging to the front plate, draws from the crisp, multi-textured dialogue between the journeying body and the polyphony of sounds of the actual location itself, having undergone no post production process.

Visual inspiration, notions of a portrait

A Russian chemist fascinated with photography, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) produced, well ahead of his time, ‘an ingenious photographic technique in order for images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters’. A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera. He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using three different filters.
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I was interested in Mikhailovich’s use of plates as a ‘triple exposure’ technique which pretends to capture the same moment at three discrete points in time. In his case to render photographic colour possible. In Portrait, I was trying to reveal those three distinct moments so as to expose the uniqueness of each and every live second, therefore expanding the concept of portraiture by inviting an experience of oscillation.