CIRCA 112 review

Caroline McCarthy: from WindoWall , 2005; courtesy the artist

When thinking of the passage through time, the terminology often used to designate the process through which one anticipates a moment is 'to project'. We 'project' ourselves into the future; we 'see' a scene; we create a mental picture. This picture is of course by its very nature intensely interior: created in a mind, envisioned within an individual's thoughts. Any description or depiction of that mental picture is a re-presentation of this interior, and as a re-presentation it is thus subject to distortion, change, differing perceptions and the unpredictable particularities of individual perspectives. This exteriorisation of the interior 'scene' is thus a complex process.

There is, however, an apparent simplicity in the all-too-easily considered duality of interior and exterior. The 'window' is, I suppose, the primary metaphor here; a window is an easy, simple device, which enables the exterior to have access to a view of the interior: as a metaphor, it is unbeatable. As a device, the window has an ease of function to such a degree that as a metaphor it avoids complexities of issues of framing, of projection. And, I suppose, a 'wall' is the window's obvious contrary, both as device and as metaphor. As a device, a wall is a boundary, it delimits the visual field; as a metaphor it is regarded as ideal inscription of a lack of connection, lack of vision, lack of perception, lack of access.

WindoWall collapses these divisions: as an invented word it bonds the two words of 'window' and 'wall' linguistically: they are no longer independent words, bur rather mutually dependent, sharing the central letter which completes one and begins the other. As a metaphor, this invented word collapses the metaphors of window and wall; they are no longer contraries but rather mutually dependent. The apparent contrary processes of envisioning, and delimiting vision, are joined in one.

As a device, Caroline McCarthy's WindoWall public art project sets in motion all of the above elements. Six large (366 x 244 cm) photographs of interiors are mounted as billboards onto the photographic scenes' exterior walls. For example, a photograph of an interior view of a student bedroom is mounted as a billboard onto the public exterior wall of the bedroom. Through the photographs, six interiors are made visible to their adjacent exteriors. Through walls being modified - billboard sized photographs of the interiors being mounted onto exterior walls - walls act as windows.

A distinct instance of time is inscripted within each photograph, which will be visible over an extended period of time (the billboards will remain on site for six months). The images - as photographs - are static. Changes in light, changes in the positioning or use of objects featured in the images are made static. Change, or the passage of time, has been refuted. The envisioning processes of 'projecting' a scene into the future are disavowed.

And particularities of the processes of imaging are made visible. The processes of imaging are full of conventions and boundaries, each with acts of delimiting. In cinema (and cinema is surely where the metaphor of image as 'window on the world' reigns supreme) there is the device or convention of 'crossing the line' or the '180 degree rule', which reinforces the illusion of filmic space, the boundaries of filmic space, its own interior and exterior limits. The mechanism or conceit is this: "The trick is to draw an imaginary circle round the subjects, designate one half of the imaginary circle to film in, and do not cross over into the other half." ¹ WindoWall defies this convention: the presentation of the photographs crosses the line and its imaging displays this. In the photographs of the interior spaces, left is now right, clock faces and words and trademarks and posters are backwards. The billboard photographs function so as to allow us vision through an unsanctioned window - an adjustment to the reality of the site. The particularities that this leads to - such as 'backwards' images - are logically and intuitively left unadjusted and uncorrected by McCarthy.

Finally, 'window' and 'wall' delineate public and private spheres, and this public artwork does more than simply reverse these categories: it exposes the vagaries of such categories, of such processes and their disavowals.

Declan Sheehan is Director of Context Galleries, Derry, and a member of CIRCA 's Editorial Advisory Board.

Caroline McCarthy: WindoWall , a public art project for Letterkenny, Spring / Summer 2005

¹ www.dainter.com/infocus/crossingline.htm

Article reproduced from CIRCA 112, Summer 2005, pp. 72 - 73

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