4th Yr UofC curates ACAD (Pt. 1) : dỉ-stôrt’

Distorted Traces

We never just look. We see, stare, peek, glimpse, and watch. There are ways of looking that invariably affect our interpretations of what we are looking at and how it looks back at us. In art, The Gaze is a term used to describe why viewers are compelled to look at artworks in particular ways. Margaret Olin describes it as “the sense of a human presence who is alive to our own presence”.[i]  Independently, the term gaze has the feeling of a long, leisurely look, but after identifying our personal reasons for looking, a gaze can become something else: wonderment, or a stare. Distorted Traces features four artists, Kiki Barua, Caitlind R.C. Brown, Pamma FitzGerald, and Lauren Mikols, whose works describe the relationships between the viewer and the viewed. In this way, The Gaze defines our personal understanding of each other and ourselves. It asks the question when we gaze, what are we really looking at?

Awareness of that question brings discomfort. We suddenly become conscious of our own presence. Barua's work, titled Ladybird, shows a hybrid: a half-woman, half-bird huddled to one side. She is awkward, shy, and averts her gaze. She lacks a place to hide; she is the only object on the page. It is because of her desire to hide that viewers become aware of their own gaze. We feel her discomfort, and yet she is merely a representation. By staring at her, we are really gazing at ourselves staring at her. We feel the presence of our own gaze. When paralleled with Birdsuit, the bird-woman hybrid becomes more distant because her suit is a specimen placed before us to be examined. The Ladybird and her Birdsuit are humorous and playful. Yet, there is something tense and distant in the way they are presented. The viewer's gaze is one of examination and discomfort where subject and viewer are aware of each other’s presence.

It is not only what we see that affects our understanding, but also the restriction of our field of view. In Brown's piece The Concealed Pains of Pomme, the viewer peeks through a device similar to a child's View-Master into the fantasy world of a young girl named Pomme. Like Barua's piece, the viewer is examining, watching, and interpreting. The difference is in the way of looking. In Brown's work, the subject is unaware of the intrusion of the viewer. The viewer is a peeping-Tom to Pomme's world. Her world is shadowed and acts like a memory, a childhood recollection of a Grim-Style fairytale. The viewer is seeing a make-believe world that portrays Pommes personality and history, or at least the viewer’s interpretation of it. We are the children looking through the viewer finder and it is our imagination that creates the personal details of the world in which Pomme lives. We can never be a part of Pomme’s world. Instead, we watch from a distance and create our own narratives for what we see.
Still, we do not gaze in isolation. Our memories and experiences, and those of others, affect how we look. FitzGerald's four works are influenced by historical postcards. Like Brown's work, the subjects in the artworks are unaware of the viewer’s gaze. In FitzGerald's pieces, it is apparent that the artist's gaze is integral to the work. The subjects are ghostly, and are memories of people painted in a flurry, as if they will disappear if not quickly captured in paint. The work is the collection of a history captured through the interpretation of the artist. The work seems historical, but at a closer inspection, the viewer’s gaze is fleeting, and not concrete. It is a hypnotic gaze that mimics the subjects themselves. Their forms are captured in history through the paint media, but their gazes vacillates between absence and presence. FitzGerald's subjects are documented by her and are based on her interpretation. FitsGerald dictates the gaze through her expressive marks and we, as viewers, reflect on her interpretation.
In Mikols’ drawings there is an absence of gaze from the subject. However, the feeling of being looked at is still present. In Ghost World, fingers that are somewhere between animal and human, droop, and crawl out from behind a mound of soft white fur. The viewer’s gaze lingers to observe the hands. There is a loneliness to the work, and like Barua's Ladybird, there is tension. There is no gaze from the subject, and yet there is still a presence felt. The lack of gaze from the subject again makes the viewers aware of their own gazes. The work differs from Barua’s in that the works are not examinations of hybrid creatures, but instead they are seductive and subtle. The Pack also mimics this lonely quality. It is a shadow, where “The felt gaze is more powerful than the seen one”. [ii] The animals are not there and yet viewers are aware of their own gaze into absence.

The Gaze has a double meaning. It is not just a way of looking and understanding, it is a way of being looked at, and understood. The artists featured in Distorted Traces show the consequences of looking, and its relationship to our understanding of others and ourselves. Whether it is staring at something unknown, a peek into an imaginary world, a glimpse of something remembered, or an absence that causes people to observe themselves looking, we interpret and understand by gazing.

Lauren Grace Simms

Sources:
[i]. Olin, Margaret. "Gaze." In Critical Terms For Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. p. 328.
[ii]  Olin, p. 328