Double vision
Noni Nixon manipulates prosaic materials such as rubber, painted board, glass wall bricks, perspex, or gaff tape to resemble the discrete hardware of high-tech sensors (covers, cables, and closed circuits). Her installations evoke a feeling of seriousness or vulnerability (or perhaps restrained hysteria), similar to the way we feel when we discover we have been examined, unaware, by high technology.
Noni Nixon's recent exhibition Double Vision included an array of small white-painted and clear perspex boxes emerging skew-whiff from the gallery wall—they looked like those electronic pods which routinely wart the undersides of spaceships. These boxes' 'big brothers' was a series of large wallmounted or free-standing clear perspex boxes each fitted with security 'peep-holes'. The eye was drawn in, to peep at these boxes' 'already apparent' invisible contents—the distortion of our own lens extended into the prosthetic space of the lens-in-a-box.
Through their meticulous architectural placement Nixon's installations effect a maximum spatial incursion while maintaining minimal physical presence. Entering the field of one of Nixon's installations is to slowly become aware of an uncanny presence; her objects have us in their view long before we even spy them on the wall.
Each element in Double Vision pictures the space of the museum brimming with the intelligent radiation of electronic communication. Nixon's design !rope draws on an anxiety pictured in such films as 1984, 2001, and Fahrenheit 451.[1] These films fantasise a near total concealment of advanced technology in the spaces of public and private life, and realise a design style which pictures advanced technology as a camouflaged parasite. This techno-insectoid paranoia is a familiar anxiety at the end of the twentieth century. An anxiety that advanced technology will produce