The thickness of our own mirages by Clare Wigney
Louis Malle’s 1979 God’s Country, a documentary on the modest farming community of Glencoe, Minnesota, begins with footage of an elderly resident tending to her garden that occupies the nature strip outside her home, alongside the street. Cars pass by, shiny and boxy, rolling slowly behind tall and brilliant flowers. Behind the camera Malle approaches the lady and says “You have a very beautiful garden.” The woman – who is wearing a bonnet and a plaid cotton smock replies “Oh yes, well as I say God takes care of the garden but the Devil takes care of my lawn.”
Humanity is god fearing and miracle dependant – the affairs of ones life are seemingly reliant upon an equivocal combination of ones mortal actions and of unseen divine powers. The woman’s evangelical statement demonstrates, in a folkloric sense, the silent and insinuated belief that there are unseen forces woven into the fabric of things.
Spirituality and superstition pervade the quotidian and the mundane – everything has the capacity to become enchanted. Somewhere along the way the occult became associated with the evil. Do ghosts tend to the woman’s garden when the devil isn’t watching? The everyday is absurd and mystical, in turn it is bewitching because of its absurdity.
The garden is a microcosm, as much as a bedroom or a living room. In God’s Country we enter into the rooms of Glencoe’s residents, spaces of ornate fireplaces and framed portraits, floral curtains, tractors, tools, toys and coffee cups.
Gabriella Lo Presti, in her exhibition God takes care of the garden but the Devil takes care of my lawn, presents a series of her own microcosms – miniatures, paintings, images and sculptures. Squinting through delicate window panes we observe a humour in the unhinged absurdity of the seemingly random yet very considered combinations of tiny objects – considered because of some very deliberate references to themes that expand across Lo Presti’s practice. One scene displays a newspaper reporting on the Kennedy assassination resting on a table alongside a shotgun and a Starbucks matcha frappe; another with an evidence board featuring the FBI’s most wanted, hung above a desk with cream pies, stringed sausages, an Evian bottle and some jail keys.
The Kennedy assassination and the fugitives point to Lo Presti’s intrigue with conspiracy and the precarious pendulum of fact and fiction in Hyperreality. The miniatures obviate a fascination with the reproduction and duplication of reality and the indistinct blur between fantasy, illusion and actuality. The works are reminiscent of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs and writings on the Italy in Miniature theme park in Rimini, Italy, wherein a knee-height leaning tower of Pisa is circumnavigated by an electric train and its shadow falls onto a shoe sized piazza. “In this endless process of reproduction, we may measure the thickness of our own mirages.” Alongside the miniatures, printed images uphold similar motifs – a portrait of a Dolly Parton wax figurine or plastic flowers in a man made grotto, mounted with a silver bracket hung next to a powerpoint – the falsification of the real and the unreliability of images.
The human is as much material as immaterial – apparitions and visions are entirely of the mind, unbound to our earthly realm. Perhaps this is the vaporous bridge between fantasy and reality. What is real is anamorphic, as we are victims of our own perception. Lacan would say that our perception is totally constructed by the projection of desire. But it is also from madness and derangement, ecstasy and hope.
When the mystical and the invisible materialise themselves in real space; when a ghost is captured in a picture; when a spirit shatters a glass; when after ones prayers God makes the flowers grow. Some believe now that if you speak fondly and lovingly to your appliances, such as your microwave or washing machine they will last longer.
One’s own consciousness is more powerful than we think – in physics the double slit experiment is a demonstration that both light and matter change once observed or gazed upon. When we observe light it acts as a particle and passes through space in a linear form and when we do not observe it it will disperse in a wave like pattern. You bend the path of light around you through observation. Physicists have no way of explaining this phenomenon. In laboratories parapsychologists attempt to replicate and produce paranormal phenomena under rationalised conditions with little successful explanations.
In Oliver Assayas’ 2016 film Personal Shopper, the protagonist Maureen navigates life after the death of her twin brother, who whilst alive, promised his sister that he would send her a message from the afterlife. Maureen is fixated on receiving a paranormal sign from her brother and throughout the film is haunted by unearthly and confused happenings. It is unclear if these are genuine paranormal experiences initiated by her desired contact with the spirit world or if these are delusions and phantasms as a product of her grief – the fixation on spiritual contact driving her lament into madness whilst fracturing her perception of reality.
In Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act II, scene 2, Bushy, the King’s servant, is consoling the hysterical Queen, who is consumed with worry and anxiety upon the King’s departure to war:
“Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows. Which show like grief itself, but are not so. For sorrows eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects; like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon show nothing but confusion; eyed awry, distinguish form. Looking awry upon your lords departure, finds shapes of grief more than himself to wait; which, looked on as it is, is nought but shadows of what is not.”
We may squint our eyes to see more clearly, crane our necks and look awry in order to gain clarity. Looking through a window, the panes divide our gaze.
In Alfred Hitchock’s Rear Window the protagonist L.B. Jefferies is restricted and constrained to a chair, a voyeur, observing through the windows of a facing apartment block, the lives of each of the rooms inhabitants. Each window acts as a container for a different persons world, and thus become like a screen upon which separate realities play out- a lonely dancing girl in pink undergarments, a man who sleeps on the fire escape. These neighbours barely meet or interact, the commonality is in their coexistence on the stage of time and space. Would the story be different if the protagonist could get up out of the chair, and see from a different view? What illusions would shatter if he could take the elevator up to one of these rooms? When the audience looks away, do they become inanimate, and do their ornaments, stationary objects, animate and become lonely dancers?
Visiting Gabriella’s apartment over the past few months in preparation for her show has been a particularly inspiring experience. The miniatures have been crafted around the dining room table. Everything in her apartment could be part of the show – halloween masks, weapons and prosthetic body parts adorn the walls atop decorative wallpaper, amongst artworks; namely a John F Kennedy portrait on a rug hung beside a bedazzled image of the Pope and a portrait of Elvis. A model of the colosseum, the size of a small trampoline, sits on the floor behind the couch with a pot plant inside of it. There are two larger than life papier-mâché men – one a Swiss guard the other a Carabinieri, patrolling the living and dining rooms. Amongst ornaments, china, books and personal possessions, are clamps, tools, timber, frames, prints on acrylic, packets of miniature objects, windows and photographs.
On one evening we sat in her kitchen eating soup, watching God’s Country on the laptop, admiring the woman tending to her garden. After leaving I rode my bike down through the city to the light rail stop and whilst waiting for the tram, like L.B. Jefferies I watched the windows of the adjacent flats flickering, the moving light of the television screens in each room sending signals out into the night.