THE VIEWING EXPERIENCE 观看心旅

“A tree stands in for a figure”                                                                                   Melody Willis

 

 

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy on a planet you’d call this one, the tree was our  ‘home’. Before that it was the sea, but we couldn’t really call that ‘ours’ (besides, we weren’t even nearly ourselves yet).

 

So it was that, after some quite considerable time of eating and being eaten, the tree was the place we’d crawled to and then up.

 

It was the structure that protected us, fed us, allowed us safe congregation. Once the tree was ours and ours alone, it was where we could look down on all the other creatures from and throw things. It was also where we could better see the creatures that had invented wings – able to fly up high without the need of a tree. How we envied them, but that’s another story.

 

And then we left.

 

We set aside our static stilts and wandered off with our left-right-left-right limbs and our nimble brains. We began to forget the tree, just like the sea before it.

 

But these things live on inside us.

 

 

Later, much later….     

  

 

 

 

‘Sleepy Eight’ – a small, early drawing in ink of a children’s room. A sturdy, wooden, bodiless bunk-bed. A poster on the wall. A ladder too.

 

The little poster depicts a Big Bang. Infinity in a starburst – the kind that advertisements use to say NEW!

 

Sleepy Eight. A robber’s mask?

Teatless breasts? A big fat arse?

 

Sleepy Eight, shed your tears.

You’re the cause of all our fears.

 

Sleepy Eight. An endless line.

A twisted circle is the span of time.

 

Sleepy Eight is for keeps;

Sleepy Eight never sleeps.   

 

 

 

 

Looking at this painting, “Idealism & Optimism”, is the dynamic of these two ‘figures’ a swooning embrace or a flailing conflict? It could be either. The image contains (within itself) its opposite meaning. As embrace, the given title is fitting. As conflict, it’s antonymic title surfaces: “ Realism and Pessimism”.

 

The figures are bound at various points; externally and to each other. Spatially fixed, as it were, in a duplicity of meaning. Two opposing states (emotional? political? et al ?) doing a loop the loop inside your head.

 

Meanwhile at the drive-in,

Father Time and Mother Nature

Get  jiggy  in the back-seat

Of their Nissan Infiniti.   

 

 

 

 

Soft Intelligence is data that is held by police or other investigative

bodies that has not led to a conviction but is held in a pool – often without

the knowledge or consent of its subject.

 

Architecture organizes knowledge of space, which is perceived as “real”

but represented as “ideal”. 

 

In Willis’ “Soft Intelligence” the sensual experience of space becomes compressed into a code. She visually appropriates the language of architecture (such as ‘double-coding’ – wherein a building design ‘says’ 

two or more things simultaneously that are contradictory, and even mocks

or refers back to itself paradoxically).

 

Bereft of bud and bloom, this tree is a hatstand for prototypical ideas. It’s festooned with nearliness; bonsai-ed by some unseen hand; by Dubiously Intelligent Design.

 

Beneath the jutting, almost insulting, one-rung ladder, the trunk loses substance; it’s own source as mere memory (in contrast to the profusion upstairs, the tree’s ghostly, five-toed root has been manicured to death).

 

The image could be seen as either accumulating in form from the bottom up. Or as dissipating from the top down.

 

Either or.

Round and round.

Sleepy Eight.

 

 

Forest in the Anthropocene Age

 

In certain parts of the world (where the economic weather is right and fertilizers – both hydrocarbon and human – are readily available) there’s a grand flowering taking place; a high-summer bloom in our heated garden.     

Our new trees are crystal-tipped and curvaceous; gleaming corporate baobabs emitting the twitter and chatter of digital babel.

 

Mighty, glassed and concreted conifers; evergreen, evergrey, everblack.

 

High-rise spruces of apartment blocks proportioned to an economic equation of maximum height to minimum land coverage.

 

From beneath their air-spacious canopies, they’re the places increasing numbers of us crawl to and climb up.

 

As the seed of currency wafts in the trade winds, as root systems of commercial invention span the globe (sucking up resources as they materialise) our new trees lean into the wind like grand sails designed to speed up the rotation of the planet.

 

A tree stands in for a figure? Well, it both is and isn’t that simple.

  

 

 

(Note: Madrid 2008 -the Air Tree pavilion is to be built from recycled materialsand will be 100% energy self-sufficient. Using photovoltaic cells, the Air Treeproduces a substantial amount of energy, which is then sold back to the localelectric companies, the profits being used for maintenance of the structure.The second by-product is of course oxygen – hence the name ‘Air Tree’.) 

 

 

Willis’ work raises many questions; about environment, social space, the ethics of progress, and places them with desert-dry wit in the ultimate context -the relentless mechanism of time.   

  

But perhaps we can sense an overarching question being asked.

 

In Willis’ world, Mankind is simply absent. What is evident are his complex, contradictory ideas about himself and his seeming domination (but in reality, flawed emulation) of Nature through his inventiveness.

 

The question is :  Will the crafty ape survive its own ambitions?  

     written by Ash Hempsall  

 Melody Willis is a founding member of Imperial Slacks Gallery and Collective in Sydney.  Her work was exhibited in the 2001 and 2002 Helen Lempriere Travelling Arts Scholarship finalist exhibition.  In 2002, she was awarded the Freedman Foundation Scholarship and travelled to Arizona to live at Arcosanti, an experimental urban project developed by the architect Paolo Soleri. She is currently completing a residency in Beijing.