Frontiers

Nicole Gingras, curator, writer, lives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Translated from French by Kathleen Fleming

The body has always occupied a primordial position in Cypis's work. In Framing Memories…, it is silent: no voice, no narration. It is fascinating to observe the body for what it can reveal: circumscribed territory, a network of tangled narratives and, often, an impenetrable surface. This ambivalence relies on the ambiguous properties of skin. A thin, fine, sensitive film where time is inscribed and read, skin is, despite its thinness and fragility, what separates us from others. Skin, a delimited, permeable zone, is a covering that provides external protection, and is also a screen receiving projections from the outside. Skin, an inscription surface, is where gazes and voices are made and unmade. What traces do the gaze, the voice, leave on the body?

While hands assume a particular status in the artist's vocabulary, sequential pairs of eyes constitute the installation's high point; the persistence and complexity of these gazes unsettle and mesmerize us. The disembodied eyes and frequent views of clouds that punctuate the work are more than analogous. Both are handled as absolute, contextless. Contemplating them exposes us to the artist's fascination for metamorphosis, through her exploration of formlessness; for there are as many movements of cloud formations as movements and intensities of gaze. Both are matter in mutation, aqueous masses. Gaze after gaze varies in gravity and degree of fascination, yet they remain impenetrable, unfathomable. They exist as screens; they screen our gaze. Veiled sky, veiled gaze.

Recollections, uncontrollable motions of attraction and repulsion, evade us. Strangely enough, the attraction of an overly-strong present annihilates or represses recollections. Framing Memories… might be interpreted as a returning to a collection of moments to stop their process of self-destruction: fixing instants to put them back into circulation and so reanimate them. Dorit Cypis's installation is a destabilizing exploration of souvenir images, and a quest for all that functions as screen; it reimplements Bergson's identification of the living being as center of indeterminacy.

"[I]n the universe, living beings constitute 'centers of indeterminacy' […]. If we just consider any place in the universe, we might say the action of whole matter passes there without resistance or loss, and the photograph of all this is translucent: a black screen over which the image would detach itself is missing behind the plate. Our 'zones of indeterminacy' would somehow play the role of screen. They would add nothing to what is; they only make real action pass and virtual action remain."