Ghosts of Duration - (after Bergson)
A critique of an exhibition held at MIC Toi Rerehiko Gallery
28 January - 19 February, 2011.
I See When You Sleep, I Hear When You Wake - Steven Chow
A 10 minute looped multi channel video installation

The immersive nature of Chow’s installation, like entering into a cinematic set situated in an unseated gallery space, provided a different quality of extensity to that of the other exhibitors in the adjoining gallery spaces. After entering into the installation one senses both visually and aurally being inside an anthropomorphic torso; a vaulted, incubated, pulsing, premature body situated between two time-expanded images of waves reminiscent of Virgils’ long rollers rolling and retreating to and from the shore; a beating heart surrounded by two exhaling and inhaling lungs; a segmented and spatialized display of the flow of being. Replacing the amniotic fluids of the womb that once surrounded the foetus we sense aurally the medical sounds of the intensive-care machine beeps, the breath and heartbeat of the incubated and the pulsing swoosh of the waves; an oceanic amniotic fluid enveloping and protecting the earth. Simultaneously with the misty valley (resonating Vincent Ward’s film Vigil), the house and the electricity poles and power line scenes that come briefly after the waves in the 10 minute video loop, Chow anticipates the delicate nature of the medical vigil that must be kept with the “breath” of the waves in order to bring the incubated premature life at the “heart” of the installation through to survival.

The title of the installation I See When You Sleep, I Hear When You Wake brought to mind research conducted by architect/artist/theatre director Robert Wilson and the idea that we see and hear on two different levels. Through our physical senses we experience the world around us on an ‘exterior’ screen; meanwhile our dreams and daydreams are experienced on an ‘interior’ scene. In his theatre work with blind and deaf people Wilson discovered that blind people ‘see’ things on an interior visual screen and deaf people ‘hear’ sounds on an interior ‘audial’ screen. Like an extended theatre performance in experiencing this immersive installation, our interior-exterior and audial-visual screens become as one; interior and exterior images mingle and become indistinguishable. Our thoughts and ideas melding and blending we are reminded that our thoughts are not material things, objects that occupy visual space. We cannot create a discontinuity between them as we do between material objects. Our thoughts and ideas can only be made tangible with allegory, with imagery, with mythology. Chow’s videos equate to an act like that of painting with ideas, with elements of duration, that memory like echo space, size, simultaneity, longevity and change over, and at the same, time - perceiving time through attention.
“To be, to exist” said of the object, means to be perceived; “to be,” said of the subject, means to perceive.
“To be is to be perceived” Esse est percipi
Warren Pringle