Amy Petra Woodward’s Exhibition, Royal Academy of Art, 25 April – 02 July 2014
You look so good in stereo. Well, of course you do. When you first read the title, how did you interpret it: as some sort of remote compliment, or did you recognise another intent behind it? Boil it down to its essential definition, stereoscopic vision is the way the brain interprets the images projected onto our two separate retinas, fusing them together to create one whole image. Yet is that look an assertion of how you see things, or is it the voice of someone separate to you, looking at you, telling you how you look physically—that you look good? Ask this and then from the very start, our relationship with the title is under analysis. This interest in interpretation in the title alone is indicative of Woodward’s work. Using the flexibility of how we physically see raises the question of what we’re looking at—which becomes a multifaceted question of also how and why. The retroreflective material she has chosen to work with seeks attention and has been designed to draw in the human eye, reflecting, as it does so efficiently, a type of eye-to-eye contact.
Woodward’s intent is reflected in the inclusion of the image of the red dress—and the particular dance scene in which it features—from Polanksi’s Frantic, a film that constantly plays with sight and perception, visual clues and deception, centred as it is around the very basic use of sight as a means to look for something, as Dr. Richard Walker searches for his wife dressed in red. This dance sequence provides a possible opportunity for climax or reconciliation—perhaps a simple replacement or resolution could take place: the red dress for red dress. But it emerges as elaboration or accumulation, appearing to Woodward as red dress x redress.
What are you looking at now? And how about before that, what were you looking at then? And—oh come now, you can admit it— did your eyes just scan the room or did they alight on someone or something in particular, lingering on their body, their face or the surface. Did they know you were watching them? And are you being seen now? Microsaccades, for example, demonstrate how we’re not even aware of many of the movements our eyes make. These are eye movements we don’t even know we are making, which can be unfortunate considering how closely and overtly they can track and reflect our inner psyches; our subconscious minds are far savvier at registering and identifying things we desire, threats, information, feelings, than we’re even aware. We’re voyeurs by nature. Our eyes alight on people and objects, driven by our subconscious— stimulants that are both innate and learned, predetermined and shaped by our lives; nature versus nurture at our basest levels.
Which raises the question, how responsible are we for what we look at? Part of this debate that appears in this work is inspired by Woodward’s interest in Epigenetics, which can be described as the means by which our genes or DNA are expressed in relation to our lives and experiences. Epigenetics are, in other words, what link nature and nurture, reading our DNA and genetic coding, then shaping and translating them to our environs—those that we developed and live in. And while this may be a relatively new field of study, there’s even now evidence to suggest that epigenetic changes can occur, altering our genes according to our personal experiences: nurture shaping nature. Which begs the question, when you’re looking around the room, how much of what you’re looking at, what your eye or subconscious is attracted to, is predetermined? And if you were to take all the random snapshots your eyes absorb over time, whether you’re aware of it or not, what would the resulting collation be? A series of untold stories that are taken only at face value; a roadmap of your psyche; a series of red dresses?
Text by Amy Lavelle
