Merilyn Fairskye, Plus+Minus,
installation view, from
left Sea {Kurnell], Sea
[The Gap],Sky [North
Head], colour
transparencies and
lightboxes, 2000.

To this near-unassailable link between the gaze and subjectivity, Merilyn Fairskye's long-term project Eye Contact provides a compelling counterpoint. For close to a decade, Fairskye has systematically made portraits of people with whom she comes into contact. Most of the 1000 subjects are unknown to her, hailing from a vast variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, but all follow the same simple instructions before being photographed: “adopt a neutral expression, and close your eyes.”

Fairskye's subjects do not lose their subjectivity thereby, for rather than provide a tabula rasa for the viewer's own musings, their pose takes them internally to a private place theirs alone to know and savour. Ironically, by denying the conventional point of access to personality, Fairskye has not diminished but enhanced the integrity and unique subjectivity of each person she has photographed. At the same time, the broad stroke of her documentation means that, rather than intimidating the viewer with the ultimate solipsism of the human condition, these portraits remind us that we are in our state of uniqueness together. This sense of shared differentiation is underlined by the captions that accompany each portrait, identifying the subject by first name, occupation, and country of birth. The captions operate partly as gentle parodies of photographic portraiture, including its ethnographic manifestations, but also as indices of equality.

Eye Contact is only one component of Fairskye's latest installation, but remains the strongest. Fairskye has chosen to exhibit her portraits on a video loop projected onto a wall-sized screen: the distended faces come into view, stabilise, and then disappear, in quick succession. The scale and simplicity of the presentation work to good effect, as does the accompanying soundscape. This comprises a collage of eighty different voices, at times incomprehensible fragments of intent exchanges of personal stories which meld and interweave to create a sense of standing in the midst of a friendly crowd.

Not so successful is Fairskye's attempt to incorporate another branch of her recent work, namely Sea and Sky, into this representation of Australia's contemporary social landscape. There is something overly literal and banal in these video renderings of slowly shifting cloud and mildly lapping sea that the artist draws on to evoke “the human ebbs and flows that have created and are constantly transforming” Australia (Artist's Statement, Plus+Minus). Indeed, these minimalist videos are superfluous to the artist's desire to provide a site for reverie and possibility, for the multitude of dreamy faces in Eye Contact more than deliver on that score. Along with the four cibachrome lightbox seascapes which line the entrance to the installation, Sea and Sky replays hackneyed metaphors and tired takes on the aesthetics of the sublime.

In Eye Contact, and its antecedents such as her beautiful After Image (1995), Fairskye has created a poetic and affecting work that muses on the complex relationship between representation, subjectivity and community. It is a work whose power needs no enhancement through attempts to push the metaphor.

Jacqueline Millner
2000

© The artist and
Images courtesy of Stills Gallery,
Sydney

Merilyn Fairskye, Eye
Contact, detail,
video installation, 2000.

Merilyn Fairskye, Sea and
Sky, video
installation view,
detail, 2000