Every time I visit ACCA, I'm struck anew by what a great space it is, and especially by how well it lends itself to rearrangement to suit individual exhibitions. This one, "The Dwelling", brings together a range of mostly video artists exploring ideas encapsulated in these comments in the exhibition guide:
The more common modern understanding of dwell is that of a safe place to remain; a pause, or a thought. It is a word that conjures up the idea of comfort, protection and rest. However, in ninth century old-English, the word dwell had a twistier meaning: it meant to lead astray, hinder and delay.
The works making up the exhibition are characterised by an interest in the symbolic meanings and resonances latent in 'dwellings' - houses and other buildings. Some engage the psychoanalytic dimensions of these issues quite overtly - "The likening" (David Noonan and Simon Trevaks), for example, in which a woman moves through an ominously gothic suburban home to encounter a seated figure at a kitchen table who turns out to be none other than herself - whereas others, like Eija-Liisa Ahtila's three-screened "Talo (The house)", in which inner and outer realms slip unavoidably into each other, dwell more in the border realm between 'psychology' and lived experience and phenomenology.
My favourites, I think, were the Ahtila video work, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's "Opera for a Small Room", which installs a small but life-size wooden hut in a darkened room with music, a thunderstorm and other incidental and not-so-incidental sound, and the 13 minute video of "House II: The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania" (David Haines and Joyce Hinterding), in which a great flow of water gushes ceaselessly from the openings of a gothic house, oddly compelling, both because and I think in spite of the incongruity, and putting me in mind of a Chris van Allsburg image brought to life.
(w/ M)
The more common modern understanding of dwell is that of a safe place to remain; a pause, or a thought. It is a word that conjures up the idea of comfort, protection and rest. However, in ninth century old-English, the word dwell had a twistier meaning: it meant to lead astray, hinder and delay.
The works making up the exhibition are characterised by an interest in the symbolic meanings and resonances latent in 'dwellings' - houses and other buildings. Some engage the psychoanalytic dimensions of these issues quite overtly - "The likening" (David Noonan and Simon Trevaks), for example, in which a woman moves through an ominously gothic suburban home to encounter a seated figure at a kitchen table who turns out to be none other than herself - whereas others, like Eija-Liisa Ahtila's three-screened "Talo (The house)", in which inner and outer realms slip unavoidably into each other, dwell more in the border realm between 'psychology' and lived experience and phenomenology.
My favourites, I think, were the Ahtila video work, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's "Opera for a Small Room", which installs a small but life-size wooden hut in a darkened room with music, a thunderstorm and other incidental and not-so-incidental sound, and the 13 minute video of "House II: The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania" (David Haines and Joyce Hinterding), in which a great flow of water gushes ceaselessly from the openings of a gothic house, oddly compelling, both because and I think in spite of the incongruity, and putting me in mind of a Chris van Allsburg image brought to life.
(w/ M)
