GARY HILL, Facing Faces, 1996 - DETAILS.
Two-channel video installation.
COURTESY DONALD YOUNG GALLERY, CHICAGO.
Standing Apart (1996) and Facing Faces (1996) engage with time-structures that are neither unified, singular, nor simply in the present tense, as the experience or awareness of the ‘acting out’ of other times becomes part of the fabric of the work.
Facing Faces, like its companion piece, Standing Apart, with which it may be installed, presents a mirroring of the viewer's looking to a monitor at head height, counterpointed by a second monitor set on an adjacent wall at 45 degrees to the first, in which the same figure, and act of looking, looks, seemingly, toward the first monitor. Every two minutes, the images alternate: the second monitor mirrors the viewer, while the first monitor looks toward the second.
Here, the viewer’s awareness of acting out, in the ‘present tense,’ ‘other’ times is further amplified in the projected figures’ relationship to each other, as the viewer’s act and time of looking is re-enacted in their simultaneous and alternating attention.
In these respects, and like Standing Apart, the installation articulates the complexity of ‘recording,’ as the ‘real time’ recording of the figure is played back in the ‘real time’ of the viewer’s looking. The very meeting with such recordings renders the present time complex, where, as, Hill points out, the encounter ‘happens in “the present” but the present has now gained a complexity that quite literally includes the replayed past’ (Quasha and Stein 2000: 258).
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