| Peering through a barely open doorway, the viewer is presented with a nude woman lying at a rakish angle across her bed—nearly drooping onto the floor. The scene is an old-fashioned bedroom strewn with significant looking objects—a carefully placed mirror, roses and other objects loaded with ambiguous meaning. Fortunately we are provided with a written narrative, explaining exactly what we are looking at. |  |
Kristian Burford’s “Rebecca” – Chris Gregga
Peering through a barely open doorway, the viewer is presented with a nude woman lying at a rakish angle across her bed—nearly drooping onto the floor. The scene is an old-fashioned bedroom strewn with significant looking objects—a carefully placed mirror, roses and other objects loaded with ambiguous meaning.
Fortunately we are provided with a written narrative, explaining exactly what we are looking at. The woman in the bed was injured in a diving accident, and has been dressed up by precocious children. The woman has also been abandoned by these playmates, their having fled at the approach of adults, and this accounts for the woman’s sly smile; she wishes to be caught by her caretakers, it is her only form of rebellion.
We can assume that this psychological moment is being enacted at the very point that the viewer peeps through the doorway into the stage-set-like room with its mannequin-esque occupant. A gracious viewer will see the room with the glazed eyes of a theatergoer, suspension of disbelief smoothing over the overall fakeness of the setting and its bizarrely modeled subject.
The position of the viewer, peering through the narrow aperture, and the pose of the woman both quote heavily from The Illuminating Gas by Marcel Duchamp. But where Duchamp cloaks his work in mystery, Burford’s installation at the I-20 Gallery lays out all for us to see. Nothing is left to the imagination, the entire narrative being spelled out on the title card in several long paragraphs.
What does the installation actually add to the narrative? The written narrative is terribly sad, giving us insight into a woman paralyzed and her attempts to assert individuality and independence in what small ways she can. Like a beautiful play poorly acted, the installation fails to keep up its share of the work. The woman on the bed is shiny and bizarre to look upon, a waxwork in a cheap sideshow—it disappoints and distracts from the pain of the narrative. We cannot sympathize with this representation, we are too busy trying to plot its position on the curve of the uncanny. The narrative creates a vivid image in our minds and the installation is not particularly useful in helping us develop or challenge our imagined setting. It is an illustration that distracts and fails, akin to buying an illustrated novel of a favorite childhood hero and finding out that the drawn image has nothing to do with your ideal version of this person. Flat and flatter this piece falls, depending on stagecraft and failed craft, while the mental ground the viewer must traverse only increases.
