Review: Derry: Katrina Maguire at Context Gallery
March 1, 2005
Picture House
CIRCA 111 review
Katrina Maguire: Picture House, video still; courtesy Context Gallery
Katrina Maguire’s installation in Context was linked to the seventeenth annual Foyle Film Festival. It uses one man’s recollection of the Castlederg, Co. Tyrone ‘picture house’ as a vehicle for her ongoing exploration of memory and imagination.
One enters the installation by pushing aside a heavy curtain. The projections play on opposite walls and reverse positions with each loop. Chairs are placed along the two remaining walls.
Maguire’s stated aim is to engage the “physical participation of the viewer” and at the same time explore “the function of the space and…the deliberate yet subtle contradiction of that function.” Certainly the darkened room, the heavy curtains, engender a sense of scopophilic anticipation, while the facing screens jar the viewer’s expectations.
The work consists of two projections playing simultaneously. One is of a lively raconteur discussing his memories of trips to the cinema of his boyhood - both his experiences and the physical space of the building. He tells anecdotes about floods during screenings, growing sexual awareness due to the late show’s designation for courting couples, and his experience of the films themselves. The other projection is a silent tour through the picture house, which opened in 1934 and, though long out of use, is still standing and appears remarkably intact.
Through juxtaposition and the lack of synchronisation of the two videos (the tour of the building does not directly illustrate the stories), Maguire attempts to lead the viewer to “question the nature of memory…how we communicate our memories and how in turn they are interpreted.”
The nature of memory is an elusive subject, made more complex when we consider memory grafted onto the cinematic discourse of the Hollywood films which the cinema screened. But the films themselves, the sense of visual pleasure which animated that space and made the building so rich in references for the storyteller, are absent.
The work therefore bypasses certain questions in the straight juxtaposition of storyteller and building: How is the activity of remembering / recounting a memory related to the activity of casting, editing, directing? In remembering, how do we collapse and expand time, re-ordering and shaping scenes? To what extent is any attempt to recreate and share a memory inevitably the creation of a simulacrum? How are memory and nostalgia linked to Hollywood’s underlying political agenda?
Sara Greavu is a Derry-based artist and member of the Void Art Centre curating committee.
Katrina Maguire: Picture House , Context Gallery, Derry, November - December 2004
Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, p.86
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Picture House – Review: Derry: Katrina Maguire at Context Gallery; March 1, 2005; #3207