Mario Lewis
Proverb
198, London
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In Proverb, his first solo exhibition in London, young Trinidadian artist Mario Lewis presents an installation meditating on the diasporan experience, commenting on ‘migration, history and belonging,’ and what he calls a ‘hybrid film’ explores ‘the passing of time, estrangement, [and] alienation as a poetic construct.’
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The video after which the exhibition is named, Proverb, confronts the viewer with a montage of sensations. It starts with a scene at night, showing the bronze statue of Eros that stands in Piccadilly Circus in central London with one foot planted, the other lifting up behind him as is he has just touched down on the ground; his wings are spread wide. The moon lights up the dark sky behind. Eros, otherwise known as Cupid, suggests love and romance; wings can symbolise flight, escape, freedom, and perhaps even hope. The images that follow, however, offer quite a different impression.
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A heavy metal grille glints in a cold, hard light that illuminates it in repeated flashes. Sometimes the bars move closer, then away again, then appear to whizz past, disorientating and unbalancing the senses. From this oppressive shots, we are taken back to the statue, but now seeing it from a peculiar angle. The idealised figure has become a monster with strangely combined limbs, and no face. The serenity of the moonlit scene is gone. Laser beams hover across the clouds as if searching for something.
Amongst these scenes, a male figure is sometimes glimpsed lying underneath a lamp, as if being inspected on an operating theatre table. It is almost like the popularised image of an alien abductee. Who is the ‘alien’ here? A thin sliver of light seen along the bottom of a closed door induces thoughts about being trapped, hiding, spying; something being out of reach.
One section shows a faded film of a black couple on their wedding day. The short sequence repeats, as if it is a fragment of someone’s memory. Where was the film made? Were the people in their native country, or had they migrated to some distant country? The greens and purples of the old piece of film have become the colours of memory. Then, bright red and yellow, filling the screen in alternate flashes, wakes the senses. The face of a young Caribbean woman is seen in three-quarters view, with her eyes lowered and mouth moving as if reading something out. The face is seen close up, but the effect is intimate rather than threatening. Is she telling a personal story?
The impact of the visual suggestions is strengthened by the accompanying electronically-produced soundtrack, performed and recorded by Reynaldo Young in response to the video on the opening night of the exhibition. At times coursing and rhythmic, at others lurching and straining, it has the effect of unsettling the viewer. The segments showing the couple and the speaking face are almost inviting, but retain their distance by their filters of colours and surface patterns, and by the denial of access to the words spoken.
Spoken words draw pe
ople in to the installation comprised of two towering yellow metal structural frames, each holding three large bell-shaped speakers surrounded on two sides by large black-and-white photographs taken in dimly lit interiors. From the speakers flow two soundtracks, taken from videos made by Lewis on his travels around selected places in London and beyond. The listener only has the clues they can gain from the conversations between Lewis and the people he met, as to where he was at the time.
installation view
The photographs provide silent counterpoints to the soundtracks. In one image, a pale marble bust sits on a classical column with shiny black tape over the eyes and mouth; the same bust is seen again in one of the other images, from a different vantage point. An odd contraption apparently constructed from a wooden stand, a coat, an umbrella and a light, looms in a darkened room against a curtain. A second bust is seen in the background shadows, also with its eyes blinded. The fourth photograph shows a furnished room in a fifteenth-century Italian villa. What makes the scene unusual is the tape that demarcates different areas: an intermittent line of black tape ‘cuts out’ the paintings on the wall; another line of tape on the floor marks out some kind of boundary line in front of the furniture against the wall. Do these images constitute an attempt to exercise a degree of control over these surroundings? To create new narratives, suppressing the sense of history that inhabits the place? Or do they express poetically some kind of internal experience, like Proverb but with a different methodology, externalising a response to the surroundings, which hold their own histories and memories, through the manipulation of the props available?
Leading on from what seems to have begun as an exploration of the UK which was perhaps also a search for his own place within the scheme of things, Lewis has created a new context that selectively combines the fruits of his research, thoughts and encounters from two different times and places in his life. The installation offers the visitor visual and audio material elements that reflect the standpoint of an individual with a complex relationship to the histories and meanings of places in which he has placed himself; each person will bring with them their own cultural histories and memories with which to interpret the installation. The video is a visceral representation of alienation, at the same time playing with the medium of the moving image. Lewis is an artist unafraid to experiment with his material in lateral ways to create alternative expressions and readings in the visual arts.
Asako Yokoya
February, 2005
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