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Colin Reaney's installation , Seeing and Being Shown: A Still Life with Apples, was a private narrative and a public lesson. It appeared to be a symbolic scene; or perhaps a backdrop, similar to a vanitas painting that has just been left by some participant; or the laying out of a banquet several hours before it is to be served.
Near the entry to a small room of this grand Victorian house was a single word, written on the floor: "there ". Above the fireplace hung a white blank canvas with another single small work: "this". Scattered apples and stacked blank canvases adorned a long table, draped in white damask.
The moral lesson here was somewhat less clear than one would expect to find in its seventeenth century Dutch counterpart, but the sense of the 'staged' was the same. One could not be sure whose absence was felt, or for whom the dinner was laid. There were no chairs, no glasses, none of the small individual cues the viewer uses to read a time and place. The stacked canvases gave a sense of anticipated production while the white wooden apples implied a falseness and folly. At eye height around the room were six small arched mirrors, angled to break up the space and to position the viewer variously. They were head size, like a hand mirror, yet their Palladian shape· referred to a grander scale. Overall, the sense was one of waiting, of suspension, of a meaning lost or a lesson misunderstood.
There were, however, subtle clues, though these were slow to 'appear'. Embroidered on the largest tablecloth , white on white, were the names Magritte and Duchamp. On