'Smoke and Mirrors'
by Angela Johnston

Let’s begin with an example: Imagine you are standing in a room. The floor is tiled; the ceiling, a type of corrugated aluminium with track spotlighting. There are lush velvet curtains encircling the room illumined with oblong swaths of light. It has a theatrical and extra-dimensional feel. At one end is a screen, whose curtains open to reveal the abovementioned room in which you stand. There are audible sounds: doors opening, hinges creaking, the distant muffle of corridor conversations and the otherwise ordinary echoed footsteps of men and women nearby. Uncannily, however, you fail to appear in the mirrored image onscreen (Mise en Scène, 2006). Although this is not a dream (or hallucination), it is nonetheless unclear where the screen ends and where the room begins and in what time the film was/is being recorded. The resulting uncertainty of what you are looking at (or, indeed, may be looking at you) both cancels out and conjures up ways of perceiving the space, dispelling any myth of ‘truth’ in the image. Instead, we face the semblance of objectivity; a recurrent theme in Roderick Hietbrink’s work, which employs elements of the cinematic in order to examine phenomenological modes of perception.

Aesthetic devices such as scoring, editing and plot-advancing conventions are traditionally used in cinema to render reality more ‘real’ or ‘larger than life.’ Hietbrink disconnects and overlaps these elements, using the semantics of narrative and tropes of noir to produce obscure, surreal and anti-climatic works. Close attention is paid to framing, and surface, reflection, illusion, doubling and mirroring are perennial motifs. Through the use of surround sound, site-specific installation, multiple screens and layered soundtracks, the filmic ‘reality’ he produces is often extended into the physical exhibition space, requiring active participation (or movement) on the part of the viewer in order to construct any ‘picture’ of a whole.

In Holly Road (2007), a two-channel video presents two circumscriptions of a grove of Holly trees in the Botanical Gardens in Palermo. In one video we observe from the interior of a car, a man driving along a dirt road, continuously stopping to open and close the gates through which he must pass in order to enter the grove. Through the windshield and rear-view mirror (which act as screens in themselves) the single event of entering a territory plays out again and again, never reaching a final destination. Parallel to this is the second video, a first-person traverse along a fence demarcating the protected area, again failing to reveal the object it is documenting (though boundaries do, to some extent, define a place). Holly Road is an incomplete document. We are denied a vantage point from which to construct any over-arching narrative, but must instead tie together our own interpretations, wholly aware of our own perception and experience as mediating factors.

Key to this is the element of sound itself. As an invisible or temporal feature, sound is often dominated by the visual field. In Mirroring 2001: A Space (2008), what at first appears as a blinding light is revealed to be a film of the film projector itself. This fact is recognizable (as is the film being projected) by the soundtrack, which accompanies the screening (and in which we are the screen) in real time. Facing the “eye” of the lens, and encountering what is literally the “reality” of the image (light), we are left not with an impression of reality, but ourselves as intermediaries, as embodied subjects.

The history of photography is full of dualisms: science and art, nature and technology, representation and truth and so on. It is between these precarious and ever-shifting definitions that one finds Hietbrink’s multifarious work, which utilizes the camera as a means to undetermined ends. Hietbrink plays with the double meaning of ‘illumination’ in photography (and film), as both production and revelation; the double entendre of ‘shedding light’ on a subject. Laden with cultural, filmic and art historical allusions, his films of nearly static scenarios border on the photographic and his photographs, charged with props, staging and references beyond the frame, seem as ‘alive’ as their moving counterparts. By leaving undistinguished the un-staged and cinematographic, Hietbrink questions the fidelity of projected space and it’s distance from reality, leaving one with the feeling that there is more than meets the eye.

©2010 Angela Johnston

-

Angela Johnston is a freelance writer based in Vancouver

Works referred to in this writing:
Mise En Scène - http://www.roderickhietbrink.nl/work/mise-en-scene
Holly Road - http://www.roderickhietbrink.nl/work/holly-road
Mirroring 2001: A Space - http://www.roderickhietbrink.nl/work/mirroring-2001-a-space