Exhibitions
Circuit
Rex Butler
In Sandra Selig's Circuit, a series of polyester threads of various lengths is pulled towards a hole drilled in the wall of the gallery, almost as though drawn by some gravitational force. On the other side of the wall, these threads emerge from the same hole and are stretched across the room before intersecting with the wall in a circle. In the first room, where the threads run along the wall, a small mounted speaker is turned towards the hole, emitting a hollow windy sound, like a breath being taken. In the other room, a light on a stand is directed towards the threads at an angle, periodically switching on and off. When it is off, the threads, which are phosphorescent, glow momentarily in the dark before fading, first at the farthest reach of the room where the light was weakest and then moving back towards the hole. When the light clicks off in this room, the sound starts up in the other. The effect is almost as though the light were being sucked back up towards the hole, which now resembles a mouth. When the light in the threads has almost died out and the noise ended, the light switches on again, recharging the threads, and the whole sequence starts off once more.
So what does the word 'circuit' refer to here? Obviously in the first instance it is to speak of the sheer mechanical insistence of the work, its turning on and off in an endlessly repeated cycle. The circuit here is something like an electrical circuit, with its own circuit-breaker, which temporarily breaks the flow of light until it is ready to start up again. Then there is the circuit—or, better, cycle—between the sound of breathing in one room and the light slowly fading in the other. It is as though a kind of exchange or equivalence exists between the breathing and the light, with some nocturnal creature on the other side of the wall feeding off the light it sucks up the threads like a straw. Or we have the impression that what we have before us is the diagrammatic representation of a set of lungs, which are diffracted or diffused through these threads into the capillaries of a bloodstream. If we can imagine the lamp retransmitting back into the room the light sucked up a moment ago into the other, then what we have here is energy being recycled in an endless circle. (And this sense of reversibility runs throughout Circuit, for we can imagine those threads not passing from the hole across the room but running into the hole to emerge on the other side.)
But there is perhaps another circuit to be seen in the work. Of course the usual accounts of Selig's installations involve seeing them as a form of drawing in space. When seen from a distance, their threads can take on a flat, linear, two-dimensional appearance, as though they were ideal or at least not simply physical. There is the sense that they are not to be touched, and in a way are not even meant to be touched, as though something of their illusion would be dispelled, or as though they would disintegrate if we came into contact with them like gossamer or fairy floss. (And Selig has made a series of pictures by spraypainting spiders' webs then adhering them onto paper, that plays on this sense of fragility and perishability.) And yet, for all of their ideality, two-dimensionality and non-physicality, there is raised the question of how these threads actually manage to reach across the room without breaking. There is about them a subtle sense of dragging or bowing, an internal quivering or resonance. Here, as opposed to the graphic abstractness of that distant first appearance, we have an intricate play of light and optical distortion as the threads cross over each other as we move around them. This is the work's sculptural aspect, in that the threads exist in three-dimensional space, are subject to earthly forces, are meant to be touched and almost invite our touch. (Here, by contrast, we have something of the stickiness and even resilience of the spider's web. And the same quality can be seen in Selig's series of flyscreen paintings, in which for all of the support's translucency it is nevertheless able to trap and frame small fragments of coloured paint.)
The real tension in Selig's work is between these two perspectives onto it: the distant and the close up, the visual and the tactile, the virtual and the actual. They are two points of view that, like the famous optical illusion of the two-faces-or-the-vase, cannot be grasped at once, although they both exist. But Circuit brings them together—or alternates them—in strange and unexpected forms. In one way, what we have in Circuit is the recirculation of light: at the same moment the light is sucked out of the main room and passes into the other it snaps on again in the form of the lamp. And yet in an uncanny way when this lamp switches on it is as though it embodies the very darkness that has just been brought about. It is as though this lamp does not so much illuminate the work as touch it as a blind man would. And, inversely, when the lamp goes off and the fading light runs up the thread towards the hole in the wall, it is almost as though this marks in a tactile way the passage of our eyes up the thread. It is as though we touch the work in the light and see it in the darkness, which in each case is figured as a kind of blindness. Selig speaks of the relationship between the two states of her work as akin to that of the moon to the sun, with the dying phosphorescence as the memory of the light that was on it like the moon is the reflection of the rays of the sun. But Circuit perhaps also provides us with the image of a sight always trying to catch up with itself, whether switched on before we were expecting it behind our backs or reaching out before us with outstretched arms.