Pamela Hobbs: Captive Beauty
Risa Sekiguchi
The spatial contradictions and perceptual ambiguities Hobbs sets up establish her photos as dream images, liberating the viewer’s imagination. Unmooring her images from real space and time, she forces each viewer to try to resolve their issues of scale. In Number two, the space between the doll and the house seems weirdly compressed; this does not feel like a scene one could walk through. The front steps of the house beckon–but can be seen only through the bell jar. In effect Hobbs’s ambiguous feelings, her troubled fascination with these scenes, become our own.
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Political types who see only social themes in art often think of spatial qualities as purely formal issues. But they can vitally affect the viewer’s relationship to the artwork and thereby the work’s meaning. Hobbs suspends her photos a few inches behind the glass of antique-looking oak cabinets, where they hover with no visible means of support, walled off from us (the cabinets even have little keyholes). In effect the presentation parallels the spatial ambiguities of the photos themselves. Seductive yet distant–both from realistic “straight” photography and from the viewer–Hobbs’s photos encourage a critical attitude toward their enchantments.
Maria Velasco in her installation at ARC, Remembering Lot’s Wife…, makes equally effective use of ambiguity, also creating feminist art more complex than a simple protest against objectification. The title suggests that the artist is reevaluating a Bible story in feminist terms, and in a recent interview Velasco described Lot’s wife as “anybody who’s experienced lack of accessibility…who has felt those invisible barriers that are all around us.”
In addition to influence by artists as diverse as Rembrandt, Goya, Rothko, and Bacon (“This very soul-oriented art, very dark, but very honest and passionate”), Velasco cites her Catholic upbringing as formative. Critical of the church’s emphasis on guilt, she nonetheless returns to church on trips back to Spain because she wants to experience “the smells, the colors, not because of the religious experience–it’s almost an art event.” And there is something altarlike about her installation, right down to its denial of entry: mysterious and separate, it hovers before us but never yields up its secrets.
As a result objects that “should” dominate in Sekiguchi’s work instead look strangely anomalous, as if the painter found these isolated things–steaks cut from an animal, an eye separate from the rest of a human figure–to be almost funny in their assertive objectness. Feet shows us two feet in profile, clearly belonging to the same person. The foreground foot is painted with some precision, yet perhaps because it’s so gently depicted, its prominence gives it no particular power. Around it are strewn a few small green leaves. Moreover the feet point in slightly different directions. Sekiguchi undercuts the common understanding of feet as representative of clear direction and purpose; the different directions here seem to echo the randomly placed leaves. Human intentionality–human power, exemplified by feet and cut fruits and meats–is a mere ripple on the vast ocean of existence.
