Recent work
... the persistence of the witness has now become the occasion for a general mobilisation of the illusion of the world.Paul Virilio
Mary-Louise Pavlovic's latest work quietly seduces its witnesses into an irredeemable position. Regimented in neat rows are twenty-four plastic buckets. At angles suggesting spill and slippage they contain twenty-four images of faces and hands; distorted, split from bodies, arising out of what we know must be nothing but air beneath. Under pressure-pressed as if under glass and trying to breathe-the images have been made from gestures forced against glass and photocopied. In the buckets the pressure of transparency distorts. They are on the surface and as if under water at the same time.
Here is photography working not so much as the freezing of images as the capturing of them, under ice. The play between depth and surface renders the distance between two and three dimensions problematic.
It works so quietly that it is deeply disturbing like watching an entire culture arranging its own drowning with martial precision. Images are immersed in their buckets. We are immersed in the orchestration of their lines of capture. They are not able to come up for air, yet they are close enough to the surface that we can see the consequences of their containment. We are made to look through the pressure, through the 'glass', through the 'water and ice'.
As so often in our rapidly de-mobilising culture, we are left only with what Virilio calls 'the persistence of the witness", engulfed in a shock which is precise enough to horrify us but then exceeds that horror through that horror's precise arrangement. Our first response is the now regular one-to