Lynne Roberts-Goodwin
Lynne Roberts-Goodwin's Phantasm was an engaging open-ended photographic exhibition. Its theoretical and textual architecture raised many questions about the cultural, historical and technological relationship between classical painting and photography. Moreover, each of the show's five enigmatic and lush colour photographs (Screen 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) constituted a gestural and multilayered representation of the (in)visibility of touch in today's increasingly mass-mediated society. Roberts-Goodwin's searching photographic practice does not regurgitate the almost (by now) canonic tenets of postmodern photography, instead it refreshingly presents, through its epistemological and formal focus, the human face and the body as being located outside the familiar poststructuralist sphere of the gaze.
What is critical to grasp here, is how the various depictions of animals (horses, monkeys and pigs) metaphorically signify Roberts-Goodwin's rhizomatic desire to problematise our current cultural and phenomenological tendency to overemphasise vision and to undervalue human touch, the gestural and the intuitive in human communication and perception. Animals, as John Berger once eloquently argued, were the first subjects for painting and, aside from their magical and symbolic functions in the human imagination, their rapid marginalisation from the nineteenth century onwards (concretised in the invention of zoos) corresponds to a similar process of devaluation apropos human tactility. (Hence, one substantial ironic reason for today's emerging cyberspace discourse of interactivity.) 1
In this context, it is significant that the installation of finely etched glass columns-a dazzling spectral aspect of Phantasm- suggests in its textual materiality two points: firstly, the legacy of the historical avant-garde in terms of shaping the basic aesthetic and technological concerns of Roberts-Goodwin's trans-generic photographic practice; and, secondly, that glass, as a medium, can hinder human communication in our