Across the works presented in her solo presentation “Monument,” Margaret Salmon brings intentions both sensitive and honest. Using 16-mm and 35-mm film, she has produced an exhibition about the formation of masculine identity, looking at leisure activities in male-dominated spaces and pursuits such as boxing, golf, and “fixing things.” For Study for a Film About Monuments, 2023, the artist stacks four television monitors atop one another along the back wall of the gallery. On screen, footage flickers between men in different stages of communing: out with their friends on the golf course, thwacking balls around, or dutifully erecting a makeshift shelter with a tarpaulin. These images are interspersed with shots of a World War I monument in Penpont, Scotland, which depicts a solitary figure frozen in time, its metal skin catching the light.
In a departure from her moving-image work, Salmon set up in a small side gallery an assortment of assemblages that feel frenzied in the best possible sense. Objects, still images, and ephemera tumble from the films and meet in the gallery, where they are displayed free from any aesthetic hierarchy. These new works have an immediacy: At times a little funny, at times a little jarring, they counter the long meditative scenes in Salmon’s films. In one arrangement thinking space, 2023, a small goalkeeper’s glove rests atop a bell, beside an upside-down mug that reads I’M THE FATHER. I’M JUST PRETENDING TO KNOW THE RULES. On the walls are darkroom test prints, some with edges caught or with noticeable folds. In contrast to a perfect representation—a mastery of replicating reality—Salmon offers us life; we step into its swirling, transient reality to find an answer, if only for a moment.
In the darkened back gallery, Salmon’s most recent film, Boy (winter), 2022, follows different males at various stages of life, investigating the ways in which these individuals perform gender through their bodies. Over a shot of a young baby, an older child announces that he will play “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance on the piano, but “not all of it.” The haunting introductory notes ring out, and the sound stays with us.
Throughout Salmon’s work, the camera is a character, an expensive friend. Letting it run through spools of costly 35-mm film, the artist puts her proximity to her subjects on display. At one point, she takes her camera into a ring with boxers, who manage to maintain their focus, as if she wasn’t there. In another scene, a small child draws a picture of the artist with her camera, as Salmon films. The looked-on and the looker now mirror each other in a lateral dynamic. Replicated through the precious analog material, moments that could seem incidental are woven into something poetic via Salmon’s instinctive editing.
Late in the film, there is a heartbreaking moment featuring a young man on the precipice of something huge, something that society traditionally will use to bind his gender tighter to him: He is about to become a father. He speaks in a broad Scots dialect while playing a video game. You feel him lose himself in this imaginary world, as if he were trying not to think about the reality about to explode into his life. I still think of him, this man, weeks after seeing the work. I think of him when I pass fathers with their small babies in the street. This is Salmon’s power: her quiet ability to pass on these stories in a way that not only illuminates, but also lasts. She makes our experiences and our growth a community concern. There is much talk of care within the art world (sometimes with the best intentions, sometimes in a co-opted way). Salmon’s work is caring. It gives, it shows, and, crucially, it holds space for flaws in their multitudes.
