ANCA Critic-in-Residence, Saskia Scott writing on Nicci Haynes' exhibition, Peephole Cinema, on display at the ANCA Gallery from the 9 to 27 September 2020.
Nicci Haynes’ installation Peephole Cinema is an assembly of eleven cardboard boxes mounted on tripods. Peering through the holes in the front of each, the viewer is greeted by one of nine films and two diorama theatre sets. The installation shows its seams and its construction. As we speak in the Gallery, Haynes adjusts the works, shifting the tripods and tweaking the heights. Even once installed, each work is a living thing: a consequence of a labour intensive process of remixing, reassembling, and reinventing. The exhibition as a whole makes this process visible — and wonderfully so — through the pervasive, subtle glitches and slips in registration.
In Figure in Space Haynes, dressed in white, moves spontaneously within a set of dark floorboards and white walls. The film is almost entirely greyscale, save for the addition of the drawn red lines that join Haynes’ limbs. The marks appear like red string, pulled taut. They are reminiscent of schoolyard games of cat’s cradle, but where children use their hands, Haynes uses her whole body to draw forms in space. In a process of making which is common to a number of works in the exhibition, Figure in Space is created by Haynes filming herself performing, then converting the video into a series of stills before printing these stills two to a page on photocopy paper. She then draws over the printed stills, and photographs the results to assemble the stop animation film. The mark-making becomes, in Haynes’ own words, a response to ‘remembering how it felt to perform the gesture.’
The relationship between the embodied experience of the performance and the drawing process became more apparent to Haynes after she introduced another performer in the film component of You or me. In this work — the only in the exhibition to feature another person — Haynes and a dancer are encased in white fabric bags that obscure their forms. They move together and apart, abstracted by the cloth.
When it came time to draw over the film stills, Haynes found that it took her longer to put herself in the shoes of the other person and imagine how it felt to be there in that moment. The film jolts a little as the registration of the stop motion shifts, reminding the viewer of the artist’s process. The room in which the work was performed has windows drawn with white roller blinds; in the resulting film, these blinds read more like overlapping sheets of paper than they do like window shades, a further reference to Haynes’ process of assembling the stop-motion film.
Unstable connection is inspired by the experience of being on Zoom – the glitches, freezes, and uncomfortable pauses that are now all too familiar. The title is taken from the default error text, and in the work the letters in the phrase ‘your connection is unstable’ assemble, jumble, group, and spring apart. Haynes uses a diverse mix of technology in the exhibition: some of the films are presented on first generation iPad or digital picture frames, and the now “antiquated” technology adds texture to the final works. In an earlier iteration of Unstable connection, Haynes experimented with a iPhone screen amplified by a magnification screen, and while the iPhone was swapped out for a tablet in the final work, the magnification screen remains, lending the film an additional layer of distortion that is reminiscent of the bubble effect of the curved screen of a vintage cathode-ray television. The act of bending down to peer inside the peephole makes the viewer aware of their own body in space. The exhibition and the viewer are contained within the rectangular box of the gallery space moving in a scene that echoes the artist represented at miniature-scale within the cardboard room of the peephole cinema.
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Image credit: Nicci Haynes, Peephole Cinema, installation view, ANCA Gallery 2020. Photo by Andrew Sikorski.
Article by 2020 CiR Saskia Scott as part of the Critic in Residence (CiR) program. The CiR is a partnership program between Art Monthly Australasia and ANCA.
