Rachel Reese
MFA Thesis

Auspex

“To be a spectator is to be passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity of knowing just as he is separated from the possibility of acting.  What must be pursued is a theater without spectators, a theater where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers.”
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

Any lived experience is encoded in memory.  As late modern, self-reflexive human beings, self-identity is constructed through moments remembered from the past; consequently, how we present ourselves is a construct of past memories. Basic to the idea of (late) modernity is the idea of freedom from traditional authorities, which gives rise to more widening opportunities for self-development and fulfillment.  The self of modernity is reflexive and individuated; the emphasis on self-reflection and individuation are clearly related to the need to find a foothold in this plural and differentiated world.   Thus, a main concern for someone living in modernity is the question of self-identity.  Oppositional from previous traditional societies, individual identity is not taken as given, but must be obtained and continually developed through reflexive activity, to come to an understanding of ‘who one is.’    Anthony Giddens, a sociologist, posits that the peculiar feature of self-identity is that the continuity involved is interpreted reflexively by the individual in terms of her or his own biography; a person’s self-identity is thus to be found in her or his capacity to keep a particular narrative going.
This in turn becomes the basis for one’s self-identity, and we project this reality onto future lived experiences.  In the present, experiences are framed between past memories and established societal systems.  As a result, we require a shared language, a visual experience, in order to interact with others.  As a visual artist, I wish to investigate this identity through a methodological exploration of the subjective nature of memories and related past experiences while involving participants and manipulating their perception in constructed installation environments (acting as microcosms of societal systems).
            I am very interested in involving the audience in an exchange.  With this in mind, I often set up an intrinsic case study environment where I am the facilitator, constructing and controlling the environment for exchange.  In this role, I am most interested in allowing viewers to decode and assign meaning, becoming their own auspex, thereby creating a cycle of questioning and supposition. The duality of encoding and decoding is a central theme in my thesis exhibition Auspex.  An auspex is historically one who fortells future events from the observation of bird patterns – an act of divination.  My use of auspex is based in the act of critical viewing, in experiencing a perhaps mundane event or setting (such as birds in flight, historically) and creating new critical conclusions through encoding and decoding the given information.  In controlling all aspects of the installation environment, I allow for a choice within the viewer to become a participant; the participant is then given the freedom to interpret the environment first hand whilst drawing on past experiences and preconceptions.  Therefore, the participant decodes the environment in the present moment, which is actually based in the past, and draws conclusions that determine future spatial relations.  These specific yet subconscious projections for future events are the moments where the participant becomes the auspex in my work.  By taking one away from passive observation, the new participant is permitted to a first-hand experience with the work.  Therefore the first-hand, or direct experience is necessary for the creation of the critical observer, an auspex, because it shapes one’s identity via the combination of past, present and projected future experiences.
            After investigating how (self) identity is constructed through past memories and presented throught the lens of spatial environments, I wanted to consider if a unique spatial identity exists, as a metaphor for the self, in a system that is set up to constantly deny memories or experiences.  My thesis exhibition centers on the social construct of a motel room, and more specifically in defining this room as a metaphor for mental space.  Motels are social spaces built to exist ideally without histories, or with anonymous identities.  Because a motel room can be considered an ‘unreal’ space, a simulated reality, it makes a valid candidate to serve simultaneously as a metaphor for psychological space.  I chose to focus on a motel room as opposed to a hotel room for its interdependence on car culture, where the car is personified; in using the car as a stand-in for individuals, this serves to preserve the motel landscape as more anonymous and thus removed.  Motels further differ from hotels in that they are generally of a homogenized appearance (usually a row or strip of rooms all under the same roof), commonly located along highways allowing car accessibility (as opposed to the urban cores favored by hotels), and oriented to the outside (in contrast to hotels whose doors typically face an interior hallway).  Motels almost by definition include a parking lot, while hotels were not (originally) built around car parking.  Thus the motel can be seen to provoke individual experience by removing the individual from the collective. 
My installations utilize the concepts of “the Uncanny” and déjà visité by creating a room similar to a “known” domestic or interior space, but (ideally) constructed in a gallery setting.  Both concepts of the Uncanny and déjà visité leave the participant in a state of internal tension, an individual response created by personal spatial identity. The resultant feeling, created in part due to individual preconceptions, is that hopefully that participants experience an Uncanny feeling in the constructed space.  The Uncanny, translated from the German Das Unheimliche, literally meaning "un-home-ly," and indicates the idea that something can be familiar and foreign at the same time.  Similarly, déjà visité, translated to “already visited,” is a less common form of déjà vu specifically relating to spatial experiences, which leaves one feeling sure that he/she has witnessed or experienced this new situation previously (an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the near past).  The experience of déjà visité is usually accompanied both by a compelling sense of familiarity, and a counterbalanced sense of “eeriness," "strangeness," or "weirdness."  The "previous" experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience genuinely happened in the past.  Both of these inter-related concepts produce a feeling of uneasiness or tension in the participant.  Therefore one is consciously aware that he/she is in a domestic-like room, just not one he/she has ever experienced before (presented in the gallery setting), playing off one’s individual spatial identity.  By returning the subject matter to the mundane, the familiar domestic or to an interior space, a subconscious spatial identity is revealed and uncovers one’s individual Uncanny response.
            For this project, I am interested in the idea of memory erasure, removing the trace of existence.  Nothing can exist without a history, and this correlates interestingly with the idea of a motel room as a neutral space to deny history.  History and memory have been conjoined in discourse as alternative ways of understanding the past; for the purpose of my thesis I use them in parallel.           
            A motel is transient - a place to pause from travel and stay the night, and all guests want to feel as if they were the first and simultaneously the last person to exist in their room.  No one wants to know who stayed the night before, and it is the staff’s job to eliminate any trace of previous existence.  We want a clean slate but know that there is a history, albeit anonymous, to the room.  Therefore, the motel room becomes a symbol for the erasure of memory – private and public, while still providing a sense of history within an empty space.
Upon entering the gallery space, viewers are confronted by a ten-foot cube of red velvet – the grand theatrical gesture that serves as the stage for the installation inside, the constructed set of a motel room.  This piece, titled Palimpsest Motel, can only exist via duality (the barrier between outside and inside, seen versus unseen).  I titled the installation Palimpsest Motel to specifically refer to the way new or present experiences overlay onto past experiences, therefore creating layers of history within an object or space.  The constructed room reveals the palimpsest nature of motel rooms via viewer participation.  The curtain serves several purposes, both functional and theoretical.  Functionally, it serves as the literal threshold between outside and inside space, creating the distance between public and private.  Second, it references the theatricality of the mind’s constructs, the concept of the “theatre in our minds,” or the “memory theatre.”   My interest in the theatrical serves to reference theatrical set design via the construction of simulated spaces and redefine the roles of artist and viewer by removing the passive viewing spectacle and emancipating the viewer into participant via facilitating the environment for an auspex.  Emancipation then calls for spectators who are active interpreters, who render their own translation, who appropriate the story for themselves, and who ultimately make their own story out of it.
 Once inside the velvet cube, viewers enter into the motel room – where they engage with the play between an actual motel room and a metaphor for internal psychological space, a space that holds memories and experiences.  At once the viewer finds himself on the other side of the curtain, behind the scenes, making him a critical participant in the installation environment.  By going around to the backside of the curtain the individual is no longer a spectator viewer, but rather takes a functioning role in the installation and is essential for activation.  The viewer is therefore privy to the functioning of the installation and allowed to physically collaborate in its production and mentally contribute and project his/her own memories and experiences within the space.  This allows for a necessary sharing of experience between the viewers and the space.
Physically in the room are a TV (playing a video), an armoire, a bedside table, a bed, and a carpeted floor – all the essentials for a motel room, yet they are all painted over in white.  Every physical object is actual motel furniture, painted white to visually demonstrate the process of ‘making new,’ as the constant cleaning of a motel room hopes to deny the history contained within it.  Similarly, by painting everything white I create a new anonymous room while simultaneously making visible the new human experiences – the footsteps on the floor, the fingerprints; every trace becomes visual to those who enter, and in turn they become a literal part of the room’s history, therefore bringing a raised awareness and inversion of the motel room as anonymous.  In making these human marks visible, we may possibly assert the transient nature of the motel while re-constructing the visual memory within the room (a palimpsest).  By removing the identity of individual objects the room becomes even more anonymous, (becoming a stand-in for the idea of a motel room) referenced only by shapes, spatial relations and pre-existing knowledge. 
As mentioned, a motel’s housekeeping staff cleans a used room, bringing it back to its pre-human state, wiping away any trace of the past so that the future occupant will feel as if the room was created for him/her. The work Untitled (cart) explores the cleaning of a motel room as the denial of history.  I have played the role of housekeeper, painting white and making the room’s features indistinct.  The end result is a cart as artifact, almost hidden behind the gallery’s side door, symbolizing the opposing yet simultaneous tools of erasure and creation.  Thus I question, does a motel room retain an identity if its past if it is (continuously) denied?  I posit to reassert the motel room’s identity throughout the exhibition via individual participants, allowing for their physical, mental, and visual participation.
 The cart, not displayed prominently in the gallery, is only viewed by the curious, and hopefully the reward is a satisfactory glimpse into the working process – a moment behind the scenes.  Playwright Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre utlilized the ‘distancing effect’ (German: Verfremdungseffekt), a theatrical and cinematic device, to prevent the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, consequently leading the audience to be a consciously critical observer. Brecht’s epic theater used various techniques (such as making the apparatuses of production visible to the spectator) in order to continuously remind the spectator of their presence in the theater. Therefore, the gallery viewer is not only physically allowed into the installation space of the motel room in which he/she takes an active role, but is also invited to witness the acts of erasure and creation – generating a cognitive dissonance between spectatorship and participation.
 Within the motel room, the TV plays a video consisting of a still shot from an actual motel room, showing the space devoid of human presence, acknowledging its anonymity, and presenting the room in an idealized state.  I want the video to exist to make viewers aware of the room in which it was filmed, in this way an acknowledgement of two spaces at once is achieved visually and mentally – one actual and one constructed or simulated.  Simultaneity therefore exists in the viewer’s mind as a liminal moment acknowledging the space they are presently engaged in (the simulated motel room) versus the awareness of other motel rooms existing at the same moment in time, specifically bringing attention to the room in which the video was filmed. This notion of simultaneity explains how someone can be physically present in a space while having a knowledge that a similar space exists elsewhere.  Simultaneity may then construct the tension in the viewer as the limbo point between past and future in his mind.  Even though one can think of the past and future, one is in a shifting reality based in time.  While both things may literally exist simultaneously in time, we can only be in one place at one time leaving the other experience to our minds.  Thus, our minds can only process one event at a time, resulting in a subjective experience of time order.  When we try to think of two separate events at once, we will always subconsciously order one in front of the other.  This is the moment of tension, the seen versus unseen (physically) – the acknowledgement of a simultaneous moment.  I hope to call forth this moment, creating attentiveness to the sequential nature of time, and call for the individual participant to actively engage this liminal mental state, thereby acknowledging the importance of its role in constructing memory and stable identity formations.
Investigating the moment of recall or déjà visité within the context of one’s memory, two works in the exhibition Autokinetic Horizon and Correspondence are dependent upon of one another.  Autokinetic Horizon consists of a photocopied horizon image taped up over and over again in linear repetition to create a film-strip or motion-like appearance referencing the traveling, linear nature of time and the photocopying process of repetition.  Any reference to time or locality has been removed, leaving the viewer with few facts about the image.  Likewise all color has been removed, leaving the grayscale image as a further step toward the anonymous or neturalized.
            The horizon line is important in speaking of the subjective experience of time order, and the anonymous landscape imagery is necessary to remove all references to specific time and location.   For this reason, I posit to embed the anonymously constructed motel room in an equally anonymous landscape, furthering the remove.  Horizon lines reach into subjective time; as the objective horizontal plane stretches away from the observer to the remote distance, a point is reached at which details cease to be knowable.  This is the borderland between the objective and subjective realms; this is the anonymous landscape.  Therefore, the horizon line can be read as a common image of the future, of future time.   Human time is experienced as one directional, always moving forward in motion.  Autokinetic Horizon references this linear forward motion, the temporality of experience, and has also been installed to reference frame rates for home videos.
            Consequently the horizon becomes a symbol for a threshold/barrier/boundary between seen and unseen, private and public, objective and subjective.  Perhaps then the horizon for a motel room is its window, the portal between these opposing experiences.  How does one experience ‘horizon’?  Autokinetic Horizon is installed at my eye level, where my individual ego organizes subjective space.  The eye’s location in space sets an impenetrable internal horizon on our visual experience.   In the act of looking we create individual subjective horizons, frames of references for experiencing the world.  (These individual frames allow for multiple interpretations on the same experience.)
Existing in mental duality with Autokinetic Horizon is Correspondence, a freestanding mobile mail unit that contains sealed envelopes, a sliding drawer, a pen and a mailbox. The upper half of Correspondence is a constructed psychological space consisting of a metronome, velvet curtains, a mirror, and a light, demanding the participant’s attention visually and audibly.  The metronome is ticking away, drawing one’s attention to the linear, inescapable nature of time; one can hear the metronome’s sound throughout the exhibition space as a constant reminder.  The light serves as a theatrical spotlight to the metronome, highlighting a tension between past, present and future time and symbolizing the importance of Correspondence as a mental exercise.
Viewers can self-address a pre-sealed envelope (the contents are unknown to them in the moment of address) and drop it into the mailbox space below.  Correspondence is an exercise in exchange, an exchange involving a slower method of communication that does not immediately gratify.  In discussing déjà visité, I want the moment of recall to happen later, when perhaps the recipient forgot all about the mailbox or their experience with my work at the gallery, when he/she receives the envelope at home and decides to open it.  Thus I wait until after the exhibition to empty out the mailbox and mail the envelopes home to the respective recipients.  Through anticipation, mental tension in the participant is developed then between the past experience of self-addressing the envelope in the gallery and the present moment of opening the envelope.  This passive exchange is necessary then to provide the space for the participant to process the work in their own time and raise individual questions.  Brecht discusses passive exchange in his concept of the distancing effect.  Much of my work involving participation can be viewed under a lens of remove from direct participation.  Similar to Brecht, I feel that this remove of space and time (physical and mental) is needed between myself as the artist and viewers as participants in order to allow for an intellectual distance to interpret the event and jumpstart critical thinking which allows for multiple individual interpretations.  Also, this literal remove in time is necessary to activate one’s memory.  (For example, waiting until after the exhibition is completed to mail out the envelopes permits the viewers to potentially forget the event.)  Thus, receiving the envelope a week or two later sparks the moment of recall in one’s mind to remember.  The envelopes in Correspondence contain a copy of the black and white photocopied image from the ‘anonymous landscape’ used in Autokinetic Horizon; hopefully by receiving this specific image in the mail after seeing it in the gallery will spark a mental recall.

To compliment the motel room installation and to further build on the window as motel horizon, I have built an interactive and intimate series of photograph sculptures titled Windows.  Based on the interplay between literal and metaphorical motel windows, I play with the scale expected of a motel room with a view.  The photographs are of small size themselves – four inches by six inches – and housed inside white viewing chambers.  The motel window photographs are cropped to show only the immediate exterior space surrounding the windows – brick, window casing, glass, and curtains within. 
            Motels (most always) have vertical shades or curtains interiorly covering glass windows.  This image, occurring from the outside looking in, represents a blanketing of its history, and keeps the memory as anonymous to those uninvolved in the experience.  The curtains become the shield that protects the individual of each private experience, while at the same time keeping the unit sterile to outsiders.  As a result, viewers to the outside are not aware of the internal experiences, which remain unknown and non-existent in this way.  The intimate size of these chambers sets up viewers to peer inside the opening to see the windows inside, creating gestural manifestations of the act of viewing.  The chambers are set up to create small theatrical moments, with drapes covering the plexiglass frame.  The viewer looks through a window only to encounter another – in other words, one begins by looking from the “inside-out” only to find another “outside-in” of this scaled-down gesture.  The space created between the viewing window and the physical photograph of the window is consequently in a cyclical limbo, hopefully producing an uncanny and unresolved feeling in the viewer.
I have further developed the idea of the motel window through Auspex: Night, an interactive window housing a video.  The video is a time-based film taken from setting up the camera at an actual motel window for a period of hours, filming cars as they come to and leave from the motel, personifying the cars as visitors.  In this way, I don’t reveal the individual guests at the motel, but rather preserve their anonymity within the motel’s promise to offer a place without history.  Therefore, the cars are a stand-in for the arrival (and implied departure) of the viewers, placing them, via association, as the simultaneous drivers and guests.  The frame for Auspex: Night is built to reference a motel window and is interactive; viewers can draw the curtains to reveal the parking lot scene, further emphasizing their role as guest, or active participant in the room’s memory.  One can choose to reveal or conceal the parking lot, choosing his role in the public versus private space of the motel landscape.
            In my thesis show Auspex I posit to emancipate the viewer into a critical auspex, by becoming physically, mentally and visually involved first-hand in the removed motel landscape, allowing one to formulate his/her own questions and subsequent conclusions.  The motel room exists in a landscape of seen versus unseen – a space of anonymity (existing between the thresholds public and private space) in between horizons of an individual’s subjective experiences with space (via the motel room installation, the viewing windows, etc. existing within moments of simultaneity).  If I facilitate in constructing a room installation, the limbo moment must exist where the viewer produces the uncanny response and this supposition causes the viewer to evaluate the situation (as an auspex).  Going forward I feel very optimistic about my work and this projection allows me to become my own auspex, considering future time.  The last three years I found myself questioning memories and constructed identities as through past experiences, and I began to investigate an equivalent in future time.  I am considering the connection between memories and imagination, where memories are a construct of the past and imagination is a therefore a construct of the future (because we as individuals have no experience with which to ground future time, only conjectures).  While my motivations for creating installations remains the same (on an experiential basis) I find my work thematically moving forward.

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