ENDLESS SUMMER: SUNGLASSES AND THE SPECTACLE OF VISION
The funny thing about lenses is that they function simultaneously as an aid to vision and a screen. Whether in glasses, cameras, telescopes, microscopes or binoculars, lenses acquire a degree of invisibility as things that we look through rather than see. As they are used to extend the body’s capabilities and facilitate our engagement with the world, the many ways in which lenses produce, mediate or interrupt our relations with others and our environments are hardly noticed.
Lilly Hibberd examines some of these metaphorical, perceptual and psychic implications of lenses in her sound and photographic installation, Endless summer: sunglasses and the spectacle of vision. The installation comprises thirty-seven almost identical colour photographs of a man standing at the water’s edge on a bright, sunny day. In each portrait the man wears a different pair of sunglasses—one for every summer of his life. Although the photographs were all taken on the same day and are not hung in chronological order, their installation in a continuous line, frame against frame, along three walls of the gallery imbues the work with a potent sense of temporality. The resemblance between the long row of black-framed photographs and a strip of celluloid is striking and marks Hibberd’s ongoing interest in exploring the relationships between cinema, perception and visuality.1
Two floor-to-ceiling tinted acrylic panels stand in the middle of the gallery space where they reinforce the highly structured and architectural qualities of the installation. The prominence of these structural elements, however, belies the conceptual fluidity of this exhibition—much more elusive and unstable forces move beneath the surface of this ordered and apparently controlled visual field. Countless metaphors of time, vision, perception, fashion, photography, light and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline