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3/6/2009

Remote Viewing by Susan MacWilliam

Istituto Provinciale per l'Infanzia, Venezia

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Susan MacWilliam will represent Northern Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition curated by Karen Downey. The exhibition REMOTE VIEWING will feature three works, including a major new video work and will be located on the ground floor of the Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia, ‘Santa Maria della Pieta’, Castello 3703. The book REMOTE VIEWING is available from Black Dog Publishing, London.

Susan MacWilliam is a video and installation artist who has spent over ten years exploring the world of the paranormal. The scope of her work is wide, encompassing research into cases of psychic mediums, x-ray vision, optograms and dermo-optical perception. Through participation in experiments, detailed exploration of archives and interviews with leading researchers and the families of her subjects, MacWilliam has developed an expansive body of work, which mediates between the worlds of art and psychical research.


Analogies between the medium and the artist, the séance and the art-making process are important in consideration of MacWilliam’s work. The artist herself says: ‘I have always thought the process of manifestations and materialisations in the séance room to be similar to the realisation of ideas and objects in the studio.’ Many of MacWilliam’s important early works, The Last Person (1998), Experiment M (1999), After Image (2002), Kuda Bux (2003) and Headbox (2004) were studio productions. In recent years, MacWilliam has adopted what could be described as a fieldwork approach, conducting social research amongst the international parapsychology community.

Dermo Optics, a work produced in 2006, is significant in that it marks MacWilliam’s departure from the studio and the beginnings of her direct engagement with the sites and scholars of parapsychology. It is an account of MacWilliam’s visit to the Dermo Optical Laboratory of Dr Yvonne Duplessis in Paris, where she participated in experiments testing ‘fingertip vision’ (or eyeless sight). MacWilliam is interested in the culture of scientific practice, the psychology and atmosphere of the laboratory experiment and its place in the popular imagination. She manipulates recorded footage in order to reintroduce something of the randomness, ‘simultaneity’ and intensity of her experience at the laboratory.

MacWilliam has worked closely with a number of well-known parapsychologists and psychical research institutions including the Parapsychology Foundation and the American Society for Psychical Research in New York. Taking both the archive and the interview as a starting point, MacWilliam presents a dense weave of image and anecdote to explore particular personal and social histories. Eileen is one of a number of works produced as a portrait of the famous Irish medium, Eileen J. Garrett (1893-1970). Based on extended interviews with family and friends, MacWilliam conjures Garrett’s private and social worlds through a series of layered and fascinating episodes.

The relationship between the medium and the camera is also explored through MacWilliam’s work, where the medium is viewed as a metaphor for photography itself, preserving and transmitting people, places and things through time. Photography and modern Spiritualism emerged and developed alongside each other through the mid to late 19th century, with séances and spiritualist activities frequently documented and verified by photography. Through the presence of the psychic investigator with his photographic apparatus, the séance room became a kind of laboratory for scientific inquiry. Photography’s status as a truth-telling medium was crucial to the growth of belief in spirit phenomena.

In the summer of 2008, while on residency in Canada, MacWilliam became interested in the spirit photography archive of Thomas Glendenning Hamilton, held at the University of Manitoba Archives in Winnipeg. A series of photographs from this collection are featured in MacWilliam’s new Venice work, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N (2009). The work was inspired by a particular image which documents the appearance of a ‘teleplasmic text’ at a séance in June 1931. Named after the French astronomer and psychical researcher Camille Flammarion (1842 – 1925), the work also features a reconstruction of T. G. Hamilton’s séance cabinet and performances by the Belfast poet and writer Ciaran Carson and Atlanta based, Danish-American poltergeist investigator Dr. William G. Roll.

REMOTE VIEWING provides a unique opportunity to follow Susan MacWilliam into the dark spaces between perception and language, past and present, the visible and invisible, as she pursues her preoccupation with the possibilities and limits of vision, narrative and representation.

Karen Downey
Curator, Northern Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale

More info on
http://www.susanmacwilliam.com

Image: Dermo Optics (2006), Video, Colour, Stereo, 4mins 9secs

Organization:
British Council Northern Ireland http://www.britishcouncil.org/northernireland
Arts Council of Northern Ireland http://www.artscouncil-ni.org

For more information contact Colette Norwood colette.norwood@britishcouncil.org

Press preview Thursday 4th June 10am

Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia
Santa Maria della Pietà, Castello 3701 Venice

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