Stefana McClure: Lost in Translation
Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York
October 24 – November 29, 2003
Cristinerose | Josee Bienvenu Gallery present Lost in Translation, an exhibition by Stefana McClure. This is her second solo show at the gallery. Concurrently, her work is included in Drawings of Choice from a New York Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio. She has recently participated in exhibitions at The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, at Yale University Art Gallery and at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, California.
Stefana McClure investigates the structure and visual properties of language. She is captivated by the physical appearance of subtitles, closed captions, intertitles, dictionary definitions, and the layout of text on a page. The exhibition comprises three bodies of work: a large group of films on paper (including a wall installation of scattered mini DVD drawings and a “video wall”); a series of ten dictionary drawings and five fiction filmed drawings. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Stefana McClure spent twelve years in Japan, she now lives in New York but remains fascinated by the gray area that exists between languages and cultures.
Stefana McClure turns text into image. Distillation of time and obliteration of information characterize her drawings. To make her films on paper she watches a film frame by frame, and inscribes successively all the subtitles on top of each other on a background of transfer paper. As the successive layers of information are transferred off, the surface of the colored paper gets slowly eroded. The image is built by removing. Hours of translated dialogues are reduced to a ghost form, dense in the middle, fading towards the edges. The hypersensitivity and intrinsic memory of the transfer paper enables these multi-layered works to become palimpsests. They have the iridescent glow of high tech video screens.
The Video Wall, an installation of Passionless Moments: Japanese subtitles to a film by Jane Campion, as shown on thirteen different television monitors, recreates the electronics store experience of simultaneously viewing the same video on multiple screens. The installation explores the qualities of clarity, precision of focus, image distortion and interference distinct to each monitor. For this piece, she deliberately looked for irregularities inherent in mass-produced rolls of graphite transfer. The scratchy gray backgrounds have the feeling of used home video tapes. The Scatter Wall (of mini DVDs and Audiovox format films) is a celebration of cinema in the form of a random scatter of 47 films on paper. Installed on a sky blue wall, the works included range from English subtitles to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film about Love to Japanese intertitles to a number of early silent films by Yasujiro Ozu to English subtitles to Jour de fete by Jacques Tati, depicted on a bright yellow screen.
She subjects herself to a series of “non-decisions” and lets the material dictate its own rules. The size of the work is determined by the format of the TV monitor on which the film was viewed or by the physical dimensions of the text she has decided to transcribe. The color and texture of the transfer paper is restricted to availability on the office supply market: graphite, red wax, yellow, pink, light blue, dark blue, white and black.
The series of ten dictionary drawings present a distillation of Kenkyusha’s New Collegiate Japanese- English Dictionary, a dictionary that prides itself on the wealth of examples it provides, and the first “serious” Japanese-English dictionary the artist acquired when she moved to Japan. The drawings offer tribute to knowledge. The architectural structure of the dictionary gradually reveals itself as more and more layers of information are removed. Also based on books, Stefana McClure inaugurates a new series entitled fiction filmed drawings. Each of the five works capture and condense an entire novel, short story or play on which a film was subsequently based. Among them: The Birds: a story by Daphne Du Maurier, Double Indemnity: a novel by James M. Cain and Rashomon: a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
Josée Bienvenu Gallery
529 West 20th Street, New York NY, 10011
www.joseebienvenugallery.com
