Maggie Cardelus: Francesca Kaufmann.
Verzotti, Giorgio
In her work, Maggie Cardelus investigates photography and its
relationship to memory. She has created many sculptures or installations
made from large surfaces of cut-up photographs, in which the image
becomes lost in the tangles of strips of paper. Her most recent
exhibition was quite different. She has begun using video, which has
radically transformed not so much the thinking behind her work as its
effect on the viewer. The first work one saw, the installation Looking
for time (all works 2007), includes an eighteen-minute video loop in
which time is "made present," almost physically perceptible.
Its point of departure is a 1996 photograph that shows the artist in a
room; she is taking the photo while standing in front of a mirror. The
video explores this image using a digital editing program that simulates
slow pans and zooms, as if a camera were probing the depicted space in
long sequence shots. This imaginary mechanical eye moves so slowly that
the video becomes almost intolerable to watch. In a separate room hung a
print of the original photograph onto which four layers of the image
were cut up and superimposed; also called Looking for time, it
literalized the idea of excavating a memory. The inclusion of a ceramic
vase as part of the video installation--like an archaeological
object--underlined this association.
The next work, Mervyn, an expanding portrait, was more touching. A
photographic portrait of a child--one of the artist's sons,
although Mervyn is not his real name--was shown on a screen digitally
linked to an Internet site. Cardelus has drawn up a contract, the terms
of which are stated in a wall text: The artist promises to keep sending
images to the site, thereby documenting the life of the depicted child
for the rest of her life. A print of the initial image is kept in a
drawer at the base of the frame, and the work will conclude with the
insertion into the drawer of the final photo, upon the artist's
death.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The last piece, Zoo, age 10, is a technically complex but
conceptually simple work. It consists of a sequence of 18,000
photographs shot over a ten-year period--beginning with the birth of the
artist's first child (but again, Zoo is not his real name) and
ending on his tenth birthday--that show the boy at home with his family,
on vacations, and so on. But images flash by so quickly--eleven per
second--that the people and settings seem like amnesiac traces: Barely
glimpsed, they are already lost; sometimes recalled, but mostly
forgotten. Every thirty minutes the entire collection is shown again,
but the computer reshuffles the order, making it even harder to remember
the images or make connections between them. The order of images is set
to begin repeating again after ten years. This "slide show" is
accompanied by a sound as drawn-out as the stream of images is fleeting;
a selection from Beethoven, originally twelve minutes long but here
stretched out to eight hours. Zoo is not simply a portrait of a little
boy but of a place, a lifestyle, an era; above all, it is a meditation
on the transitory nature of people and things. Its reassuring images of
everyday life disappear, leaving us to reflect on the inevitability of
death.
--Giorgio Verzotti
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
