Megan Rooney's 'Echoes and Hours' exhibition at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, is all about immersion. She spent three weeks painting directly onto the walls in the first gallery, and then creating large canvases for the main space. As soon as I walked into the mural room, I felt a strange compulsion to look at the doorway and walk backwards in order to experience the work rather than walk forwards, seeing one section at a time. The direction didn't come from the staff, the exhibition catalogue, or the text introducing the work written across the entrance walls. It came from the colour. I could hear it saying 'in order to really see me, you need to move yourself. You need to see me on the move'. And that's thing thing about immersion. You have to move inside it. You are implicated. You are part of it all. There's no exteriority to hold onto - no bird's-eye-view. No appeal to 'objective science'. You are in it. You are part of it. There's nowhere to go. I can't help thinking that as the world burns right now in so many ways, we need to learn this lesson urgently: there's nowhere to go. There's no outside. Here we are. How do we want to be in all this violence and all this colour?
Some twenty years ago I studied the performance method of Jacques Lecoq. We spent at least a month, possibly more, nine a.m till nine p.m, Monday to Saturday 'being' colours. It was one of the key opening sequences of the two-year intensive programme. It's quite a hypnotic thing to do and it certainly changes your way of understanding what the world is. Colours really do move. It's a frequency thing or a vibration thing. Some pull you in towards them, some push you away. We embodied colours individually and then as pairs and groups. We found out how one colour might collaborate within itself (Kandinsky was always great at exploring this through shades and intensities), and then how multiple colours collaborated between each other, mixing and moving together, or pushing and resisting eachother. We stared at paintings in galleries as an ensemble and turned them into performances. By the time we finished the 'colours' segement of the pedagogic journey, I found it hard to walk out in the street because my god everything moves! Every colour is literally pulling and pushing, embracing, repeling, dancing, sulking! The colours are lively! They are alive!
Standing literally inside Rooney's painting I thought about all these things as I moved around and documented with my phone. Feeling my way through the deep blues and the pastels, the intentional lines made in stubs and flows, meeting its particular universe halfway, realising I was already becoming part of it, as gravity pulled lines of paint down in gentle drips like a jealous lover 'this way only!' until encountering brushstrokes floating up up up, resisting gravity. All this change. All this interiority. And I thought about the last time I was immersed so completely not just in a gallery work but in a gallery space, feeling the art and the artworks as one flow of experience. It was in my mother's gallery.
What is it about time and motion? How space-time-matter all entangle so that I could be in a gallery in 2024, immersed in the movement of colour as part of a painting, and at the same time be in NYC in 1986! Present with me now I could feel my memory bringing another space into this space in an everyday flash of superposition. Not just colours but spaces - they too are alive. Always present.
My mother's gallery was not colourful. Sure - she showed colourful pieces of very contemporary art. But she had decided to rebel against white cube. She painted the entire gallery, all it's walls, all it's ceilings, black. I used to sit in the gallery everyday after school immersed in the black that made the paintings she exhibited under theatre lights 'pop' like corn kernels. (She never kept any exhibition going too long as the heat of those lights would have made any respectable painter nervous!) "Not bad for a little girl from Mashhad, who has no art training and left school at 16!" she used say.
Not bad at all. Of course the gallery dream couldn't last long and we left the NYC pretty quickly and mum and I ended up in refugee housing in Stockholm with my exiled grandmother in a real riches-to-rags story. But that's all for another time. What I want to say is that in a sense I took the gallery with me and have always taken it with me.
Mum was adept at navigating all terrains in her gauge-yer-eye-out stilettoes. So she covered the entire floor in tiny pebbles like a zen garden. This made it incredbly hard to walk across if you were in anything other than sturdy boots! She used laugh sometimes and say "that'll teach those NYC stiletto b-tches!" (yes literally) and whilst she was something of a queen of the glitterati back then, she was also capable of adapting to anything (like many 20th century children of Iran).
Me, I never used to just sit in the gallery gormlessly hanging around from the 3.30pm drop off by the school bus till 6pm when she closed up. What looked like a seven year old child bored in a sea of black for two-and-a-half hours a day in gallery whose walls had glimpsed the stars of NYC and even Hollywood rock up as they mooched around the new trendiest day spot in town, was not that at all. I wasn't zoned out or bored at all. I was quietly and very actively immersing.
Once mum exhibited these life size horse sculptures. They were half solid and half chicken wire, or hobby horse, or nothing at all. They even had their own little stable wiith hay. They pranced in and out of reality, their partial bodies captured mid gallop and trott. In the blackness I saw them all spring to life. I saw them move!
The Freudians here will most likely stroke their own imaginary beards, adjust their little Viennese glasses on their noses, and say 'Ja! The blackness is the womb! See how she writes about ze immersion and ze mother!' (apologies for the badly transcibed, imaginary Austrian accent here...) By all means. But I am not a Freudian. I don't centre all things around the so-called 'human'. Because as so many contemporary scholars have lamented, who gets to be human in the first place? Who decides the parameters - which have changed throughout history? Some groups, ethinicities, genders have been denied the exclusive naming (and all the susbesequent violent rammifications that follow from these exclusions).
Humanisms have a lot to answer for. Sure, there's a lot of beauty in Humanism, but at what price? What happens to all those other dancing many-worlds? There's a more than human world of spritely agencies, of colours and forms, trees, animals, cells, amoeba, plastics, circuits, selves and bacteria. How do they engage us? Immersively speaking to us, as us.
I blink and flash back to Rooney in 2024. I am now in the reading room upstarirs at Kettle's Yard. How can colour be an identity? How can colour and immersion come to disrupt our identity in 'echoes and hours'? In one of the many books scattered about in the reading room, I found this by Rooney:
The line at the top of the image, to my mind, peers through all the others below: "my paintings are portals, they give me somewhere to go and something to do with my hands". Folding time and space and matter, each brush stroke constructs a doorway to thousands of worlds that exist in thousands of times.
It's interesting that walking through the immersive mural room first creates an entirely new experience of looking when I enter the room dedicated to the canvases. It's not just that the paintings are different - though clearly in Rooney's unique inimicable style. It's that my whole way of looking has changed.
Now when I look at each individual painting, I'm so much more painfully aware of the white space around it. Like each canvas is a doorway, a cut, a portal made so by its sharp suggestion that the whiteness is an exteriority upon which the colour quite literally hangs. So too, I notice the bodies of the viewers change. Now we get static viewing. The cut that lies between canvas and wall locates and fixes the body in a viewer's spot.
In a sense it moves us from experiencing the work like a wave form - shifting moving around the immersive space - to experiencing the work in particle-form, which has a defined shape, much like a canvas defines the shape and deciated positionality of the painting. This idea comes from Niels Bohr who in the early 20th century showed that light was a particle when the experiment to study it was set up in one way, but that it changed into a wave when the experiment was set up in a different way. How could light be two things at the same time - his answer, it changes depending on how you measure it. A canvas tells us 'the work is here'. And immersion blurs the boundaries, making us and our viewing more deeply part of the work itself.
Taking this further, imagine being 'a human' sometimes (when looked at by a certain person) - a human with certain rights and accesses, but not 'a human' in the same way when looked at by someone else. How do we construct what it is to be human? This runs to the heart of identity. To making self. To how violences have swept the world - you are only human when the experiment is set up in a certain way...
That's why all this endless conversation about immersion and colour, vibration and movement is so important. These phenomena literally make up how we experience the world, and so in a deep sense, they make worlds. Worlds that have very real effects on people's lives. And that's why I love how Rooney's exhibition moves us from immersion to canvas-defined portals. They change the way we see. Not just what we see. These 'portals', these immersions, these identities: they lead to an otherwise. An otherwise of seeing. Noticing. Being. Dreaming. Of making worlds. Both rooms do it. They do it differently though. And that's what's interesting - to look at the processes of differencing, not just the differences made.
How can we learn see differently, dream differently in a world that is burning? By making portals. By moving inside immersions, never clinging to an outside answer, but an eternal inside that we are both swept away by, and always responsible for. An ethics of immersion and arrival that dances - always dances!
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