Susan MacWilliam
Out of this World
Curated by Doug Jarvis
It's hard to talk about the paranormal without conjuring up the question of the real. This in turn, forces us to look at how we ourselves, as inquirers, perceive the world around us. How do differentiate between what we call the real, and what we might call the imaginary? What sensibilities do we use to take in the stimulus of the world and play with it in our own ways?
This is the murky terrain of the work of Susan MacWilliam. As with many artists who use archives and other subject matter created by others - her goal is not to prove without a question of a doubt what is going on in the work, what is and isn't real. It is the shadow of doubt that is the curiosity. For the shadow casts a form of its own, creating gaps and pinholes of chance that carry communications from other dimensions. And, it is within these shadows that the rules of engagement change. Multi-dimensionalities collide and any talk of interior and exterior awareness gets problematized by one's own presence in the equation.
With her newest work, MacWIlliam transforms the often-enlightened book jacket covers of works in the library of consciousness and paranormal research. Book titles such as Yes, we do survive!, Beyond Telepathy, and Telephone Between Worlds, are transformed into spherical shaped phenomena that give physical form to the projected knowledge shared between worlds. These manifestations hover before us as objects and as portals suspending an ambiguity of what we know and how we know it.
In this way MacWilliam continues to blur this ethereal space for us, conflating the parapsychologist's laboratory experiment with the artist as material support for the possibilities that occur in speculation. The artist herself becomes the form that suspends doubt in the face of curiosity, giving us a shield from the penetrating stare of making sure. She holds the camera to the sun to give us room to be here and elsewhere as we choose, lurking in the shadows of doubt, imagining what it means to be out of this world.
