Since she photographed herself throwing books out her apartment window in her exhibition Double Self Portrait in 2001, Allyson Clay has been interested in exploring books as a visual trope. Working with their ethereal nature, in terms of knowledge, information, and ideas, and their material substance as objects/possessions with heft and weight, she considered books, like sustenance, to have a material effect on the body.

Her new exhibition, Each Wild Idea, began as an effort to document each page of a single book, "A Room of One's Own", by Virginia Woolf, placed underwater. It was intended as an homage to a text that had a significant impact on her thinking when she first read it years ago. The use of water to create "a wavering, multilayered symbolic realm", signified on several levels. Most obviously the water referred to Virginia Woolf's suicide by drowning, though her texts spoke across the chasm of time represented by the otherness of water itself. Water deformed the book as the passage of time deformed the present.

If a book suggested an idea as a thing, Allyson Clay felt that a book underwater suggested an idea out of place, a surprise catch — like lazily putting a line into the water and forgetting about it until "you know the little tug —the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out...". As her work grew more concerned with artistic process, she started to include different books in her photographs, art history texts, fiction, chapbooks she had written, postcards and theory.  She wanted to show how shimmeringly ephemeral ideas could be, how delicate, brave, how variously formed each was from the other. By juxtaposing the abstract notion of water's otherness with the real location of the urban pool (or park) that contained specific books, she balanced real social space with the imaginary possibility of thought. Each, she found influenced the other. Each was critical to the other’s formation.


 

Unlike traditional video, which engenders a passive engagement with its audience, lenticular technology provides an active viewing experience. A spectator who watches video is fed a stream of images the way the video-maker intends them to be consumed, at the speed and duration dictated by the medium, while with a lenticular print the viewer must physically pass the image to see it, thereby controlling the speed and direction of the experience. This activity transmutes video into an object. Viewing becomes interactive, incorporating various elements of sculpture, installation and performance.

Gareth Long’s exhibition And She Was, is comprised of four lenticular prints, each an object on the wall containing a series of fleeting moments originally captured on video. Because lenticular images can hold a maximum of 20-30 frames per second (unlike the more generous 30 frames per second playback of video) the image is restricted to a moment of time and the print is less video-like. The result is less about documentation and more about suggestion: teasing instances, passing glances, moments that are stand-ins for so much more. Where once video showed all, technology has stripped away the definite, leaving parts of a male-female dialogue, sexual exchange or negotiation that, because of the nature of lenticular technology, remains unconsummated. The viewer as voyeur is left to construct the narrative, walking past the image and not stopping to contemplate it, in which case both the technology and the story malfunction. The work shifts towards agency, activity, participation — the very things required for communication, relationships and understanding.