White Peacock / Leigh Orpaz
Longing for the end has always been part of human civilization. An aesthetics of disaster expressed in various ways as a fantastic crescendo, a larger-than-life drama. It was supposed to be an epic, spectacular and impressive ending, perhaps that’s why we didn’t note its sharp, quick and unceremonious arrival.
Reality penetrated like dust, fine and grainy, slowly accumulating on the elastic, illusive world of images, a faded layer on saturated, glittering sheen. What’s left for us? Only to set up the scenery of a world that will never be seen again. To bask in our longing for a past that had a future. To yearn for it, somewhat tired, somewhat terrified, from our place in the wrong future. To see (in 4K, on-demand, via a broadband connection) the ghost of the nonexistent future haunting the present era.
Many of the images that Leigh Orpaz positions in her solo exhibition White Peacock are faded versions of modernity’s promises: charred images eroded by time that were gathered from the artist’s family archive and other places, including rolls of film and slide collections. Others don’t face the past, but the invisible present. They try to document and make accessible things undetectable to our senses: images that trace the invisible movement of air.
Thus – combining photographic means from different periods, preoccupied with the photographic image and its distribution – White Peacock roams between the domesticated and the unruly, between the apparent visible and invisible, between the desire to find order and rationality and the recognition of our fundamental helplessness, subjected to a reality we are powerless to change.
No Kingdom
The peacock, such a strange species. It’s marvelous, colorful tail feathers of fascinating eyes that surround it like a crown. The colors are not caused by pigments but by the superficial features of the substance itself: thin layers that break the light and send it flickering before our eyes. A fitting characteristic for a being known for its ability to show and to be seen and proves that evolution is more than a mere mutational process of reducing excess, that it has invested interest in appearance, in aesthetics.
The evolutionary tendency of the peacock to prefer its courtship abilities over its camouflage, makes clear why we have been so enchanted by it since antiquity. Nothing comes near it in symbolizing glory and splendor, royalty, honor, love and passion. It is easy to see why in many cultures it was considered a sacred animal or at the very least a gift from the gods. Its ability to change and renew its magnificent feathers each year made it a symbol of regeneration, of immortal beauty.
Orpaz does not present us with a single peacock but with two, standing side by side in a light box that seems to enhance their whiteness. These peacocks are born white due to a rare genetic mutation found mostly among peacocks raised in captivity. Their survival ability is based largely on incubation farms, whose clients are mostly the operators of tourist attractions. Sometimes all you need is an over-the-top animal.
Orpaz’s duplicated peacock, therefore, is a consequence of human engineering; a living being that has become an accessory created to entertain. Our anthropomorphizing eye, somewhat narcissistically, seeks echoes from its surroundings, to reflect our assumed singularity. We like rare things.
The peacocks and their peacockish qualities seemingly emanate from the light box to the rest of the exhibition. In a screen diptych, half video half still photography, the peacock reappears in what looks like an English garden – a style developed in the Romantic period, its foundations in the artificial attempt to create, through labor, the perfect landscape, a landscape that exceeds nature, an experience of nature based on the concealed (yet well known) control of the flora and fauna.
One side of the diptych is a video work showing a white peacock lying on a piece of green grass. Behind it, a flock of flamingos form a pink chorus line. The other side of the diptych is a projection of a still photograph of a different, yet similar, English garden. The gardens merge thanks to the capturing eye, which is adept, almost nonchalantly, in locating golden ratio compositions, the eternal combination of beauty and harmony.
Not far from the diptych stands another incarnation of the peacock: the peacockness that is not its own but serves merely as a consequential concentration of the human characteristics we attribute to it, namely, dandiness, vanity and arrogance. This comes in the form of a looped projection of 16 mm film showing a male figure skater. He shines brilliantly in the darkness of the hall glittering with dozens of stars – the lights shining for him alone. He skates toward us quickly even though the video itself is slowed down. His figure gradually grows while turning and elegantly and precisely lifting his leg to jump. And there! slivers of ice send him like flashes of fire on a wonderful jump, yet the jump itself never comes. Orpaz withholds the catharsis of the spectacular exercise and sends us over and again to the beginning of the video. The brilliant figure skater will perform the duplicated opening of the exercise again and again, perfectly, always almost reaching the climax which will remain beyond our grasp, beyond our field of vision.
Prolapse
It is not only the skill, ceremony and repetition that separate us from the figure skater. It is also the red color resting on the image like a veil, separating us from the documented moment: a transparent, impenetrable screen through which we can look into the past, unable to experience it in all its force and unable to let it go. The red is the fruit of passing time, the outcome of the oxygenation and wear and tear that inevitably befall negatives and celluloid films, especially if they weren’t stored properly. It is the aesthetic mark of nostalgia, based in a chemical process of wearing away and disintegration of the material to its constitutive elements. Rot.
Similar failures, the erosion and chafing of the image, appear in other works. So, for example in a photograph displayed on another wall: a slide that Orpaz excavated from an archive she was given. A figure of a man in a dark suit and fedora stands atop a hill, his fingers interlocked behind his back, his head cast down. From the hill downward stretches a rural landscape, green and tranquil. The roads are unpaved, traces of life made by repeated use. Further away are red tile roofs, cradled by the green treetops, calm under the light-blue sky.
The photograph could have been easily misrecognized as the familiar figure-in-landscape format. Yet, the deterioration and chemical failure distort the gaze and enrich it. They remind us of the hidden work demanded of us when we come to excavate the original image from its current material state. The field appears green before our eyes even though the original color contrast has collapsed leaving only sparse flashes of gentle color on the brown-greyish surface. Almost absentmindedly we complete the green, the technicolor blue sky. Then the gaze pauses at the center of the photograph, on the horizon, where we see a round orange stain, proof of age and excessive chemical processing. Strange. The ease with which it merges into the photographed image: a blinding light, a damaged sun.
The chronological failures serve Orpaz as an artistic tool, both the ones that leave a mark on the material and the photographic technological means of display (such as the bulky monitor showing an image of a telecommunications tower). These can be seen as reminders of another era, of previous technologies in which we saw promise and threat. On which we also depended our hopes for salvation. Like in the images, the technologies themselves can be precieved as muffled echoes of the signs of life that passed and left us as echoes of echoes, duplicated duplications.
The Model
Besides these, Orpaz positions lenses that note what the eye cannot perceive. It reminds us that our immediate perception of reality is based on very limited sensory organs and is therefore partial and constantly in the wrong. The technologies we discovered for examining, measuring and noting that of which we are deprived further emphasize our natural limitations and remind us just how vulnerable we are.
A round projection, for example, introduces us to Schlieren-effect footage. This effect is created through breaking the rays of light with a parabolic mirror, used for documenting differences in air pressure and density, to literally see another small portion of the material that sustains us at all times. This pause in front of tiny dancing particles opens a round window into a world we inhabit anyway, without knowing.
The Schlieren effect came originally from the realm of experimental science. This is also the source of another large projection: a tiny model of what looks like a metropolitan structure inside a wind tunnel. The structures are represented with reddish stone blocks (pieces of felt) and on top of them tiny trees simulate green lungs. The structure of this space is abstracted from life, devoid of the social forms it creates and is created by. It stands silently before us in bluish darkness, like a synthetic dawn.
A green laser beam in constant slow-motion cuts through the model. Its presence allows us to see the movement of the smoke flowing between the miniatures. The particles in their movement become phosphorescent green trails of smoke. Reveals the movement of air. A soundtrack by Daniel Meir envelopes the video from all four walls. Its rich sounds interweave with the cool images and move slowly through the model, like the flow of green smoke. At times the high frequencies become saturated, over-burdened, their edges distorted, as if scratching the note.
What kind of yearning remains in this temporal-in-between space, while waiting without knowing for what? What? How can it be used?
Orpaz doesn’t provide a decisive answer. She only traces one between the lines, in the nuances, in the minute disturbances and lost translations, as if to say: here too, life is possible.
If the impossible becomes inevitable, if you can lose something you never had, feel nostalgic towards a time unknown, perhaps this sense of loss is something worth hanging on to. Perhaps focusing on the unrealized horizon is also a refusal to abandon the desire for the future. And those who don’t give up will still learn how to yearn for what is found beyond the small menu offered by the frantic and weary present.
Curator: Ran Kasmy Ilan