In the often austere white cube world of contemporary art, it takes an artist like Lynette Wallworth to wake us up again and make us feel something, anything. Her three installations previously on show at Carriageworks as part of the Sydney Festival, move you. These soundless, poetic narratives bring you quite literally, face-to-face with grief, loss, mourning, and the transitory nature of human empathy.
The intense silence was the first thing I noticed when I entered the exhibition. Disorientated and anonymous in a pitch black room, no-one speaks. It wasn’t the kind of silence you often find in galleries though; that valorized silence of being watched and being heard. Instead, it was a silence of respect and immersion. Everyone was aware that they were witnessing something quite profound. We didn’t know each other, but whilst in that darkness we formed a temporary community. There was something very anti-hierachical occurring. Without surveillance we existed alone with the works. Without wall text telling us how to behave or telling us how we should understand them , the installations of Wallworth are really about something greater than that. They dapple in light and darkness and force us into the realization that light is at the centre of everything. We are not. We are only ephemeral.
For me, the work that triggered my most affective response was Invisible By Night, 2004, a piece that came into existence following an encounter Wallworth had with an inconsolable woman on a train.
You enter a dark room. As your eyes adjust, you see that down the black corridor ahead of you is a video projection of a woman’s shadow. The image is murky and she stands alone. She moves ever so slowly. As you walk up to touch the screen, you interrupt her solitude and she travels towards you. Her hand comes close to yours as she wipes the condensation away and you see her face more clearly. Her eyes speak of deep mourning, but separated by a screen and the technology that allows for her existence, you cannot help her. You walk away.
Wallworth revives the cold postmodernist soul, and for that, we are thankful.
