the likening
The Likening is the first video installment in David Noonan and Simon Trevaks's trilogy which is exploring supernatural themes. Sourcing the horror genre, the video consists of a lone female protagonist wandering through a potent environment toward a climatic confrontation of self-realisation, yet at the crucial point of recognition and discovery, resolution is suspended. The protagonist's psychological quest is caught in a loop of frustration, creating the illusion of a meeting with the self that results in an evocative ambivalence of identity and a sense of mysterious, perpetual metamorphosis. Exploring the theme of the double, an archetype in dreams, the protagonist's trance-like state evokes a sense of 'dreaming awake', situating the images somewhere between the living and dead, past and present. Here, the protagonist remains poised uneasily in a mysterious spatial and temporal zone that shifts between narration and documentation. Noonan and Trevaks approach their subject matter according to elementary scenes and a minimal cinematic syntax, accentuating an open-field, a scenario of ambiguities that implicates viewers in the never finished process of creating the meaning of the work. This appears as a defining characteristic in the artists' previous video collaborations where the interest seems to lie in what transpires between image and viewer, and not in the end product, thereby endlessly deferring cinematic expectation.
Exploring the strange and cryptic world of the doppelganger provides the premise for The Likening, where reality dissolves into a duality-exterior evidence versus interior perception of that reality. Adopting their signature loop printing, Noonan and Trevaks compress time and evoke tension, examining issues of simultaneity and seduction, the uncanny and supernatural, horror and humour, pleasure and desire. In conjunction with the protagonist's zombie-like reverie, the video