Thursday, January 10, 2002 to Saturday, February 23, 2002

    Opening
    • Friday, January 11, 2002

    The evidence has been gathered. The truth though is I am stuck.

    I learn about Karen Henderson's plans, yet underlying all along has been my certainty that I know nothing about it at all. I could describe intentions and the moving of matter. At other times it is seductively clear to me as an idea, but dauntingly unclear to me as a presence or event.

    Consider:

    Time, like mind, is not knowable as such. We know time only indirectly by what happens in it: by observing change and permanence; by marking the succession of events among stable settings; and by noting the contrast of varying rates of change.*

    I have been entertaining a deceptive series of facts. Perhaps one of my many errors is the misplaced sense of control that comes with explaining how something can be. Currently the minutiae I think about places me at a persistent, uncomfortable distance. Perhaps, if I retrace my steps, something will emerge.

    I am standing at the southern end of Gallery 101's second floor exhibition space, along with the paraphernalia of the photographer behind me. Numerous bags, cases, lights with stands, a tripod, a 4x5 camera. Next to me is the photographer covered by his black cloth, busily concentrating on blocking out all extraneous light. It takes time to line up the predetermined framing of the white wall, ceiling, and bare floor in front of us, to focus on the verticals and horizontals that demarcate this particular space. Enough time for me to wonder if any space is ever empty. Enough time to think about the artist's past work and its quiet poetry. But can emptiness - air - be poetic?

    Facts: pot lights, hooks, fishing wire hang down from the ceiling from the past exhibition, marks on the wall, the texture of spackle filling up previous holes. And, of course, nothing is square. Light rails, corner posts, floor lines, ceiling lines, all modify their original courses.

    I have heard people call the room "beautiful"; a white box with high ceilings, made less cavernous by the floor's warm plywood colouring and diagonal panel patterning. What I am beginning to understand, as the camera focuses onto the far white wall, is that the empty space is becoming the thing itself. Consecutive moments are being recorded from one particular point in space, drawing attention to the "hereness" that surrounds us.

    The photographer's tripod is secured to the ground by duct tape strips, a vice-grip used to secure the camera as much as possible. Systematically he registers over and over again the whiteness in front of us, following Karen's precise instructions. I think about the impossibility of these conditions being maintained. Imperfections are inevitable, shifts happen: the lens can move ever so slightly, dust can gather on the film? No two intervals are the same and yet she constructs her work, layer by layer, second by second, as if they are. The premise is that, once assembled, the individual moments will be aligned.

    How this time-based investigation is to be condensed into a particularized volume, and its surrounding space activated, remains unknown. How attentive we can also be to what is around us is also uncertain, fraught with all sorts of difficulties. We can verify where we are and agree upon its tangibility, but finally, as the artist herself acknowledges, it is the instability of this assumption of the real that confounds us.

    Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field?

    Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers.*

    I wait to look and wonder.

    Deborah Margo

    *All quotations are from George Kubler's The Shape of Time - Remarks on the History of Things, Yale University Press, 1962.