Dorothy Cross
Dorothy Cross’ exhibition of new work employs the revelatory and voyeuristic traits of video and photography, combining these with sculptural work, to play with what is at risk, on hold, erotic and curious.
The show begins with a work called Endarken, which characteristically juxtaposes the artificial and the natural. We are shown a dispassionate view of a derelict famine cottage in Connemara; it looks almost like a still but clouds slowly drift across the screen suggesting the journey of time and weather which has caused the cottage to decay. A small dot appears in the video – at first it seems like an irritant then grows, like the pupil of an eye, finally obliterating the entire picture.
The title of the second video, Midges, suggests a presence that cannot be seen. The camera circles around a strange hollow in the landscape, hesitating once or twice then finally revealing the naked body of a woman lying face down astride the bough of a tree. Her status is unsure, her posture suggests that of an animal, she might be unconscious or even dead as the tiny flies would be too great an irritant for any sentient being. Then something occurs.
In the next room it is almost as though the physical impression that the woman may have left on the bough of the tree has been transposed onto a large industrial metal Tube. In contrast to the void that flows through the structure, her impression is superficial. Tube is accompanied by Candle – turned upside down a darkness is illuminated discontinuously.
Still is a transparent image of a woman caught in a twisting motion. The image is transient – it can only be seen when the light shines through the transparent sheet of glass; the camera has caught the figure at a moment of transition – neither still nor moving.
At the heart of the show, the video Eyemaker again contrasts the natural with the artificial. Filmed in an ocularist’s workshop, the camera carefully observes how the ocularist lovingly crafts a glass eye – a perfect cosmetic replica of the organ of vision that perversely will never see. At the end of the video Cross has directed the ocularist to obliterate his work – blowing apart the artificiality of this perfectly formed replica and revealing its inherent dysfunction.
