C106 review

Manchester: Grace Weir at Cornerhouse

Ever since the Renaissance, one of the functions of art has been to raise questions about the relationship of time and space as mediated through the viewer's perceptions. These short films and related works by Grace Weir situate themselves in relation to this history, while renewing its basis through an investigation of the links between visual representation and relativist physics. By its very nature this is ambiguous territory, referred to by the artist as a state of 'in-betweenness', and it makes demands upon the viewer through the continual necessity to negotiate a path between art and science. In addition to Forgetting (the vanishing point), projected onto an outdoor screen in central Manchester's Exchange Square, this exhibition mostly consisted of paired works occupying each of Cornerhouse's three galleries. In each case a major piece, the large-scale projection of a short film, was accompanied by a second work on video monitor as a kind of 'footnote'. These collaborative works made with the astrophysicist Ian Elliott helped to introduce a different register of engagement with an already slippery subject matter.

Déjà vu questions the relationship of two parallel events, a woman driving a car along a jetty beside which a man throws a stone into the sea. Both occurrences trace movements through time and space, the perceptions of which, according to quantum physics, are affected by the role of the observer. As viewers we experience both events from the position of each protagonist, while devices of repetition and slow motion suggest the subversion of linear time. The four-minute duration of the piece was suggested by the disjuncture between the length of the solar day and the sidereal day (measured by the stars). Yet the frustration of narrative expectation is also a familiar strategy of avant-garde cinema; in this sense it's probably easier for an art-literate audience to know how to respond to a piece like déjà vu rather than its 'footnote', paper exercises, an unedited conversation between Weir and Elliott explaining the basis of the Theory of Relativity.

Grace Weir: déjà vu, video still; courtesy the artist

In dust defying gravity a single unedited tracking shot describes the movement of a dust particle falling through the interior spaces of the Dunsink Observatory in Dublin. The viewer, then, becomes a spectral presence hovering over banisters and stairwells, eventually coming to rest over a desk, where the wavering camera takes in the opened books and instruments that indicate an interrupted project. Although suggestive of the inevitability of gravity, affecting even the smallest dust particle, the hypnotic fascination of this piece stems also from its uncanny resonances; the viewer becomes a detective moving silently through a sequence of outmoded spaces. One of Weir's continual concerns has been with disruptions of perception and viewpoint, evidenced in both dust defying gravity and around now, the double-screen projection shown at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Here the screens provide two different encounters with the same cloudscape, interspersed with vertiginous glimpses of the ground far beneath.

All three large-screen projections at Cornerhouse had a mesmeric richness of association that was also sharply undercut by their companion pieces. The transition from the poetic to the materialist exemplifies the disruption of viewing pleasure by the introduction of forms of knowledge probably outside the expectations of most gallery audiences. This is by no means a bad thing, but it does make for an uneasy relationship between observer and observed - just as it raises the question of just how far Weir succeeds in maintaining the fine line of the exhibition's title.

Fionna Barber teaches art history at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Grace Weir: A Fine Line Cornerhouse, Manchester, September/October 2003