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Can
you imagine being ill, at a hospital, and praying
to the Virgin Mary to heal you, and then looking
up and seeing her image in a window, clear as
day? Hope transcends reality, so much so that
a stain in a window becomes a divine conduit.
Believing is seeing. We think of our eyes as cameras,
machines that passively deliver accurate visual
information. But it is our desiring selves that
use complex and little understood cognitive processing
to interpret retinal data. At the Marion Apparition
at the Milton Hospital, witnesses not only saw
Mary in some condensation in a window, but myriad
other images of churches, Jesus, crucifixions
etc. in chimneys, trees, and bricks. Locating
ourselves in the universe, and in our everyday
realities, is to search for a response to our
calls, whether they be driven by religion, illness,
or desire. Images, whether an apparition, a Van
Gogh painting, a Hubble photograph or a cloud
formation, offer us tangible proof of an invisible,
interior need.
In June of 2003 newspapers around the world reported
Mary appeared in the chemical residue of a third
floor window in a small hospital in Milton, MA,
a suburb of Boston. In the first weekends of her
appearance 25,000 people or more flocked to the
site to pray and witness the apparition, and have
created an altar below the window for prayers,
donations, and flowers. The image is made from
the residue of ruptured chemical seal in a double
paned window. That little stain implies or provides
a huge breadth of history, all this information
beyond language, a fundamental story/myth of our
Western world, and ultimately an experience that
is beyond words.
Stain,
2003, another collaboration between Jane
D. Marsching and Deb Todd Wheeler, is a video shot
from below the window, standing in the crowd. Through
a slow extremely close look at the apparition itself,
the video wanders over the surface of the image, as
if trying to see it more and more closely. In this installation
the piece is experienced through a portable audio video
headset that projects a 52" image ten feet in front
of the viewer. Like an apparition itself, the image
is haunting and elusive. The sound of conversations
and descriptions of the image emit from a suspended
dome shaped parabolic speaker. Listeners feel the sound
in their bodies like a heartbeat and see the image as
it hovers in front of them, creating an intimate and
visceral experience. We chose from all the myriad conversations,
moments when people described literally what they were
seeing, "do you see that magenta in the bottom left?".
Every person sees different things and they see different
things on different days. Since the invention of the
first communication technologies in the late nineteenth
century, we have always suspected or been afraid that
there is something lurking within the electronic devices
that surround us: something more than just rational
ones and zeros, something just beyond the range of our
perception, that sometimes we can feel, hear, see, and
even speak to… Stain offers the viewer a virtual environment
filled with a ghostly scrutiny of a miracle.
PRC
exhibition:
Concerning the Spirituality of Photography January
23 - March 14, 2004
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