Eamon Oʼkane Overlook Eamon Oʼkane Selected Lense Based Works 2000-2004
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Overlook Eamon OʼKane Overlook Eamon OʼKane Selected lense based works 2000-2004 Orchard Gallery, Derry Triskel Arts Centre, Cork Galerie Schuster + Scheuermann, Berlin Overlook DVD projection, 3 mins 2002-2003 Overlook As Berlioz’s menacing Symphonie Fantastique an endless duplication of the phrase “All work and no ment via an antiquated lift. By mirroring the image, dimensional representation of the viewer in three- plays out over the opening sequence of The Shining play makes Jack a dull boy”) and the circuitous route not once but twice, O’Kane disorientates us, so that dimensional space. Again, we don’t exactly feel as (1980), director Stanley Kubrick pursues his subject around the hotel, filmed using Kubrick’s notorious the image literally folds back into itself and we are though we are at the spot where we find ourselves. (the writer Jack Torrance and his family) towards their steadicam – through identical corridors and doors thrown from one point of entrance to another. It seems especially in his exploration of the Bourbaki mountain retreat. Despite the spectacular Montana and lifts and finally around and around the hotel’s Panorama (a 19th century panoramic painting housed scenery, surf filmmaker Greg MacGillivray denies the frozen maze. “The building I was staying in,” O’Kane recalls, “was in Lucerne ), O’Kane is less intrigued by the formal spectator a sublime or omnipotent viewpoint, choos- occupied mainly by elderly people who seemed accomplishment of the painting and more by the ing instead to sweep behind, up and over Torrance’s Monday Through Sunday is not simply a compliment trapped within the building and were confined to experience of the visitors in relation to the painting car as it makes its way along the mountain road to Kubrick, however, but rather an embodiment of the going up and down in the lift either to the common in its own museum. In turn, by layering the images and towards their fateful destination – The Overlook dichotomies which run throughout O’Kane’s entire room, laundry room or to get rid of rubbish”. O’Kane’s and creating a cacophony of sound, he denies an Hotel. Isolated at the foot of the mountain, the hotel practice: the utopia and dystopia of the rural retreat; evocative accompanying soundtrack of jangling keys, omnipotent viewpoint. Here O’Kane is pointing to the appears both imposing and imposed upon. It is of the distant view which resists closer inspection; doors sliding opening and banging shut and laundry artifice or illusion of representation. Just as the interi- course central to Stephen King’s original novel – a civilisation and its antithesis; artifice and the natural turning around-and-around is also heard to fold back ors of The Overlook Hotel was constructed at Elstree brooding presence which seems to detach the writer order. O’Kane employs a diverse range of media, into itself, so that this sense of confinement is height- Studios in England, the establishing shots filmed in from civilisation, engulf him in its empty, labyrinthine playing one material or technique off against another ened by reoccurring sounds heard backwards and Montana and the exterior shots filmed in Oregon, so interior, and ultimately leads him to his death. The to explore the full potential of these concerns. forwards. The viewer is faced with a barrage of mul- the panorama of Bourbaki and O’Kane’s representa- establishing shots of Kubrick’s film serve then to tiple entries and exits and the confusion engendered tion of the panorama are constructed fictions. introduce the film’s nemesis and to place us firmly The mental and physical process of disorientation, by the multiplicity of partial views seems to suggest within its grip and he draws upon the rich literary the oscillation between subject and object and the a potential occupant’s/prisoner’s psychological con- Whilst these works certainly indicate O’Kane’s sheer associations of the ‘house in the woods’, to create a implication of death, surge vividly through O’Kane’s dition. enjoyment of the formal acrobatics of stereoscopic sense of the uncanny from the start. recent videos for example. These works seem locat- filming and digital manipulation, and link his practice ed somewhere beyond sleep, between fiction and Architectural historian Anthony Vidler has described most closely with the cinematographic accomplish- It is this conjunction of isolated beauty and impend- reality. They encourage viewer, physical context and such an effect in relation to the architectural uncanny, ment of The Shining, it is perhaps his work made in ing danger that lies at the heart of the work of Eamon represented space to draw near to one another and comparing it to the condition of schizophrenia. Here Co. Donegal that reveals the true nature of O’Kane’s O’Kane. His tribute to The Overlook is most clearly move apart. Their subject is estrangement, unease he suggests, in response to the question “where are persistent interest in Overlook. embodied in Monday Through Sunday, a looped – the Uncanny. you?”, the schizophrenic response would be, “I know video sequence of still images of the exterior of the where I am, but I do not feel as though I’m at the The House in the Trees and Plantation document hotel from the film, inter-cut with the names of days of The Uncanny or unheimlich, according to Freud’s spot where I find myself.” The absence of ‘anchors’ his family home, a 17th century plantation house the week. Echoing The Shining’s screen titles (which definition of 1919, is invoked through the recogni- in O’Kane’s work (whether human figures or legible owned by an officer in the English army. Just as the progress from months to days to hours as Jack tion that something is missing, something familiar exit points) thus induces a condition similar to that of ‘Overlook’ in the hotel name might be read metaphori- Facing page: nears his catastrophic descent into psychosis), here that has suddenly become de-familiarised, as if in schizophrenia or spatial phobia. cally as referring to the ‘overlooking’ of the site’s guilty Stills from The Shining by Stanley Kubrick the days are rolled out week-by-week-by-week, the a dream. This nightmarish quality is heightened in past (it was built over an Indian burial ground), so the This page: days and nights marked by exterior shots of the hotel O’Kane’s video work through the propensity of the Certainly O’Kane’s exploration of the panorama O’Kane house is cast as a place of mystery, of pos- Stills from Overlook 2003 one-after-the-other-after-the-other. The sequence double. For example, in Overlook (filmed whilst through works such as Panorama Spectator and sible fear and confrontation through the figure of the Detail from Jeff Wall’s Restoration, trans- mimics Kubrick’s device of repetition: from Jack’s O’Kane was on residency in Tilburg, Holland), he Panorama Interface explore this further through soldier, the frantic movement through the wood and parency in lightbox, 1993 denouement (the revealing that his ‘novel’ is simply records a mundane journey from entrance to apart- the formal possibilities/impossibilities of the two- the mirroring of the exterior of the building. 5 6 The House In The Trees DVD projection, 25 mins 1994-2003 O’Kane recognises the forest or wood as a space 19th Century such as Barbizon in the Forest of which has been historically formulated as a place of Fontainebleau, the notion of Villegiature (literally mystery, outside culture, and thus, a figment of our meaning ‘deprived of the city’) has impelled artists imagination. Cultural theorists have long recognised and writers to seek out the rural idyll as a site of crea- the forest as a potent metaphor for the antithesis of tivity. Worpswede can be understood as a sequel to civilisation. In Grimm’s Fairy Tales, it is the forbid- Barbizon, as can the Academy Schloss Solitude: a den territory. In Marx, it is the politically contested Baroque castle which houses an academy on the boundary between the lords and the common Volk. edge of the Leonberg Forest. The association of As A.S. Byatt recently suggested, “The fairy tale rural isolation with creativity has persisted today with journey into the woods is a movement inward, into models such as the established Banff creative resi- the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairy tale dencies in the Rocky Mountains and even the con- forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the version of the Taransay pods from the BBC Castaway depths of our unconscious. To travel to the wood, to TV series into an artist retreat park. face its dangers, is to emerge transformed by this experience… Italo Calvino has made the inevitable Seen alongside his unnerving, video compositions connection between storytelling and the forest… “He and digital invocations of the uncanny, however, sees a light in the distance, he walks and walks; the O’Kane’s paintings of the ‘ideal studios’ seem to fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where resist the romanticism of the rural residency move- is it leading?” ment or artists’ colony. The forms of the architecture cut across the trees and vegetation suggesting an O’Kane’s series of large-scale oil paintings Studio in unwelcome and unyielding intervention. They recall the Woods oscillate between this fiction and reality. that first glimpse of The Overlook Hotel: the brood- The architectural visions of Wright, Alvar Aalto and ing presence of an exterior, emptied of its human Elam & Bray are glimpsed through the trees, the occupants. buildings’ lights flickering in the dim distance.