Detail of Night Comes On (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist.
Night Comes On was a meditation on the process of looking and being looked at. The installation allowed the viewer to become a voyeur, peering into private spaces while navigating around imposing structures of flickering, hypnotic light. There is an undercurrent of scopophilia, while at the same time the viewer is kept aware that their own presence has not gone unnoticed by the very devices through which they are spying. The voyeurism becomes a self-conscious act, one to which the looker is both implicated and subjected. Night comes on as we moved around this city of windows.
Laura Dutton is a photo/video-based artist and an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria. She received an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2011 and a BFA (Hons.) from Concordia University, Montréal in 2006.
Dutton works with photography and video installation to unravel the materiality of photographic images and disrupt our ability to look straight through to the referent described. By obscuring, degrading, or removing the subject matter altogether, her images reveal their own process and become distilled suggestions of what once stood before the lens, offering an epistemological space for the viewer to meditate on the act of seeing and knowing.
For more information on Dutton’s work, visit her website.
Seeing Laura Dutton’s Art
Interpretive essay by Will Hoffman
Night Comes On is a fascinating exhibition that Laura Dutton has created. Black boxes, many black boxes scatter outwardly positioned like speakers as if they are projecting something. They are stacked in a way that many will face you from different angles. The black boxes are like a model of an ambitious architectural building, each box like a room, a unit. In this vast array of boxes many of them contain screens playing out scenes.
In these scenes contained within the box within a window frame there are figures moving, some moving closer, another turning on a light, there is a branch moving with the wind.
You can look at what people in one frame are up to and then move onto another. It’s like you are interested in these people and these people in the videos are interested in you or you are apart of it somehow. It would feel creepy to be looking in on these figures but the fact that they are darkened to where you cannot make out their faces gives them some anonymity. The silhouetted figures paired with muted tropical coloured light sources and their arrangement with others remove many social taboos with observing and instead create interest.
Taking in this exhibition made me feel a subdued presence combined with a genuine curiosity with these lives on display. With the changing of everyday technology, people are sharing more and more of their personal lives. Seeing an Instagram story of what a person is up to brings a directed viewpoint that is measured. In this exhibition, the people in the windows won’t get to see the analytics data that @username_611 has viewed their story, for how long, and when he exited the story. In the same way, I don't know if @emily.cats.life wants to share this moment with the public other than we are able view in her window and if she required more privacy could close the blinds. Maybe the interest to see something removes the self-consciousness of oneself being seen.
Breaking up the space in this exhibition are also window-like pictures within steel frames. They are window-like in that they appear like a window but are not the window themselves. Looking at these illuminated windows closer, a moiré pattern (an unwanted artifact that can appear when overlapping dots) is blown up to such a large degree that the dots exude their own beauty. These dots almost create a type of sacred geometry and dance over each other. From afar these large lightboxes show windows in an abstracted way with washes of colour that create forms, some of which appear stuttered or rippled.
This exhibition is a window to a lot of questions but it also sprinkles some resolve about watching, peeking, and being seen.