Simryn Gill
Tracy Williams, Ltd.
My Own Private Angkor, 2007–2009, is a document that looks like a dream. Simryn Gill’s suite of ninety black-and-white photographs, which has previously been exhibited at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, was taken near Port Dickson, Malaysia, a seaside town that in recent decades has been developed as a beach resort. Gill, who will represent Australia in next year’s Venice Biennale, made these images in a housing complex that was constructed there in the 1980s but then abandoned and never occupied. At some point, the houses were ransacked for metals to be sold as scrap; among other things, the vandals stripped the aluminum frames from the windows, leaving the glass panes leaning against the walls in otherwise empty spaces where time has given everything a patina of dust.
This backstory of real estate speculation gone awry supplies the entire overt content of the work, which is otherwise little more than the placement of those windowpanes around the deserted rooms. It’s a familiar tale we’ve heard even more often since the housing bubbles of Europe and America burst a few years ago; one can easily imagine similar images being made in spots ranging from the suburbs of Dublin and the Costa Brava of Spain to Orange County, California. But while it’s never amiss to point out the irrationality of housing markets, such critique is clearly pretty far in the background of the drama Gill’s images suggest. I think she was more interested in—perhaps even identified with—the thieves who are the other invisible forces behind these scenes, following the speculators. In these images, the fascination of trespass becomes palpable and takes on an eerie beauty. It’s impossible to view them without feeling that we are looking at something that was never meant to be seen, that we are stepping through territory that is somehow off-limits. I have no idea whether the photographer entered these quarters with permission or whether she had to sneak in through a hole in a fence, nor do I think it finally matters. But the pictures themselves are illuminated with the heightened perceptiveness that comes with risk. We sense that even as the photographer slowly, carefully took in her surroundings, she was poised to hightail it out of there at any moment, should the unwelcome sound of another’s footsteps be heard in the distance.
Formally, there’s a nod to Minimalism in the repetition and seriality that characterize the sequence as a whole, the way each image seems to be a sort of variation on every other. And of course the shiny rectangles leaning against the walls inevitably recall John McCracken. But the lushly atmospheric quality of these photographs is anything but cold or impersonal. One thinks instead of photographers who insistently pursued an inner vision rather than objective reality—image makers such as Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, or Francesca Woodman, artists who seem to be trying to catch the shadows of ghosts or to see, as Meatyard once put it, into the past, the present, and the future at once. Meatyard’s fascination with abandoned antebellum mansions is echoed in Gill’s attentiveness to more contemporary ruins located an hour’s journey from Kuala Lumpur, but what distinguishes her from the photographers I’ve mentioned is the absence of the human form in these images. And yet what she shows us is not quite an empty stage. There is drama in these works—a play of appearance, absence, movement, tension, and maybe transcendence—but the protagonist is light. Like the scrap-metal thieves, perhaps like the photographer herself, it comes stealing in uninvited. The light invades the space in oblique shafts, advances and withdraws and mingles with shadows in movements the photographer traces with great sensitivity, and in that way it takes the measure of time.