Albino : Mimmu and Mammu Rankanen. White Cube : Walker and Walker. These are separate titles for separate rooms in one exhibition space, the Temple Bar Gallery. The absence of 'and' between titles seems to fall like a lost tooth; I wonder about the fate of the missing conjunction, wonder why the two are not indicated as one. The distraction, however, is momentary.

Inside the gallery, under and around white cubes, the Carebear hides, a creature of childhood, carved from the marble of David. Memories of cuddles into soft plush made hard--a cuddle here would break teeth. Duckies, dogs and bears made into Platonic forms of play-toys, recalled in memory. Something striking of the Truth, it would seem. Walker & Walker say geometrical forms (the white cube) have lost meaning, are no longer accepted as the basic gestalt of visual perception, no longer represent transcendental order. The white cube (and by extension, geometry and a religion in Mondrian) is subsequently killed by the irony of kitsch and nonsense: the Carebear care-taker becomes undertaker. The death of geometry, then, buried perhaps next to God in some great beyond. And what can replace geometry in the never-ending search for Truth? White Cube leads us to the diptych. The word looks funny: diptych. Laugh. But then realise the diptych, once suppressed to near nonexistence by the almighty triptych, here now rages forth in a double vision of identical pairs of dogs, ducks and bears, rallying a cry for the new Truth of Two, the royal We as one made 2wice. It is the comfort of having the self as companion from conception--because the self is knowable and from knowledge comes truth. And truth--well, that's what we're after, after all. Which is all very remarkable because suddenly the woman sitting at the edge of the room looks in my direction and says: "In this room, the Walker brothers, twins." 

There is a wall between the two parts of the exhibition, and as I cross over the threshold where the woman sits like proverbial gate-keeper, she says to me: "You've missed the dance, but it is about white. Mummies and angels and things like that." Two sisters, Mimmu and Mammu , from Finland, also twins. Again there are couplings of images, but it is a different faith in two--photos superimposed on photos, the missed dance overlaid onto still-life images that become apparent in the gallery installation. White dollies, play-toys again (not Platonic)--Barbies and Cupie little things masked in white. A row of Barbies mummified and some of them remind me vaguely of Ana Mendieta, her figure lost in reeds and mud. With Albino, I am sometimes delighted, sometimes disappointed by the materials, but what is more important is how white in this room recalls feminine Truth and spirituality. Perhaps the remark is obvious, but there is a truth to be found in an ancient moon-goddess, Luna, and all things white. That very moon-goddess, later adopted by Christianity in the form of the Virgin Mary. Because it seems to say that one being can have two forms--a coupling: of objects seen and a dance missed. The self and its companion Doppelgänger(in). 

White unifies the exhibition and here another truth is appropriated. In alchemy, white represents the albedo , which is the white state of innocence associated with the daybreak, the first light arising from the horizon, not yet burning with the red of the sun. White is thus the blank --but white also holds the alluring power of the spectrum, all into one. White in itself thus has a dual nature--a fitting accoutrement to two bodies of art by twin siblings in one exhibition. The new truth of two is perhaps an old truth, where the ultimate duality of male and female is unified in a coniunctio in white. Oh heavens! The old biology has not been abandoned--long live Carebears, Barbie dolls and that missing conjunction.

Mimmu and Mammu Rankanen : Albino ; Walker & Walker: White Cube , Temple Bar Gallery, October/November 1999 

Amy Jean Porter

Review reproduced from CIRCA 91, , p. 50.

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