Liisa Roberts.

JANICE GUY

Gracefully deferring our desire for instant esthetic gratification, Liisa Roberts' installation, betraying a portrait, 1995, was designed to do seemingly anything but happen all at once. Roberts' artistic statement emerged slowly over the course of an entire afternoon. Arriving at the gallery at a particular time guaranteed a glimpse of only a fragment of the whole "work" - undoubtedly the experience of most visitors. Though the "work" was always present, it was also in a state of partial withdrawal, unwilling to emerge from a condition of virtual opacity until a particular hour of the day triggered a brief period of layered unveilings.

Visual evidence emerged in a rather unusual fashion. Two 16-mm. film projectors were installed on a large, tall, open-frame steel structure - a cross between a Constructivist assemblage and the scaffolding used in theatrical productions - that dominated but did not overwhelm the small gallery. A 35-mm. slide projector was located nearby. Each day, beginning at one o'clock and ending at midnight, a series of 24 slides taken over the course of a day were projected onto a wall. The slides actually "represented" the same gallery wall on which they appeared, so that it was almost impossible to determine exactly what you were looking at. A wry take on the seductiveness of mimetic strategies, this eloquent reflexive gesture intersected subtly with the natural lighting conditions of wintry December and January days, signaling a critical look at questions of site-specificity that never became didactic.

Every day at 4:59 P.M. "real" time and "simulated" time dovetailed: as dusk fell, the slide taken at dawn was projected against the wall, so that the image of the wall was finally visible, beautifully and transparently superimposed on the real wall. At that moment, two ephemeral, obliquely related film projections began running simultaneously, each alighting on a distinct aspect of the space. One of the films opened with the back of a woman's head framed against blackness, her hair dramatically parted down the middle and gathered into topknots at either side; this image disappeared to be replaced by the phrase "of honesty," which scrolled up from the bottom of the image to eventually disappear out the top. The woman's head reemerged, turned to face us briefly, and then her image was momentarily replaced by the phrase "of integrity." In the final moments, the phrase "of honesty" again scrolled from top to bottom, the anonymous woman reemerged, then turned to face us for one last time. Concurrently, another film was projected on an upper wall of the gallery: it depicted the interior of an apartment, shot at night with a continuously rotating camera.

What this installation "betrayed" was a portrait of art as an activity contingent on "real time" and "actual space," a reflection on the mutable nature of both, and on how representation has the capacity to transform the mundane into its opposite; here, the gallery space became a veritable fiction of itself. Roberts' project also spoke about the limits of portraiture, the extent to which identity is always somehow under construction, tenuous, sometimes even spurious. Beyond this, Roberts seemed preoccupied with the signifying capacities of both visual and literary narratives, suggesting that any imaginative transformation of lived experience into its symbolic Other is slippery and expressly nonlinear. An everyday experience of time folded in on itself, as the day's beginning and end were made to symbolically and gracefully collapse into each other.

Through a spare poetics, betraying a portrait suggested that site-specificity is a kind of tautology, and that the identity of a place is always symbolically linked, at least in memory, to another. But it was that strangely archaic, and certainly arcane meditation, on a defiantly anonymous woman - or on her broken narrative - that finally pulled you in. The artist's vision of her imagined self, trickling into representation, perhaps?

- Joshua Decter