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Flagrante Delicto (2002) |
Flagrante
Delicto
During
the Middle Ages, to cut, pierce, brand or dismember the body served as
a reminder, an aide-mémoire of transgressions committed by an individual.
Pain flares from the center, radiates toward the edges of the frame, then
fades into black, leaving behind a memory-trace. Artist Gaye Chan, using
found negatives made by professional and amateur photographers from the
1940s to 1970s, renders visible Hawaii's history without the guardrail
of nostalgia. Damaged by moisture and time, Chan's prints reveal streaks
of light, clusters of fungi, focal distortions and cracks. The red infusion
throughout connotes desire, violation, and consequence, while the color
yellow suggests illumination, power, and atonement. In Flagrante Delicto,
Chan engages in an impassioned examination of the master plans implemented
decades ago that propelled Hawai`i toward non-sustaining agriculture and
tourism. Hung
in a linear configuration, Flagrante Delicto comments on how memories
and histories are created and revised each time we see visual narratives.
Beginning with repeated images of children standing knee-deep in water,
we perceive the instability and temporality of the human body, while the
ocean seems to exist outside time, rippling toward shore in ceaseless
rhythm. This image, printed from the only set of stereoscopic negatives
Chan uses, is duplicated in varying ways—reversed, overlapped, slightly
askew—which lead the viewer to question simultaneously the similarities
and differences between them. Throughout the exhibition, the use of repetition
conveys a droning sensation as in the five consecutive images of a hula
dancer: "paradise" as mass-produced, relentlessly commodified.
There is also a haunting quality that pervades, spectral presences that
linger in the mind long after one leaves the museum. Punctuating
the sky is the imposition of a dream—the American Dream—upon
the language, culture, and society of an indigenous people. This act of
transgression is caught flagrante delicto and, by a trick of light, is
recorded onto film, revealed years later as burning evidence. A street
grid, a convoy of planes, a pair of hapless tourists carried above water
in time for a snapshot. Through the filter of the present and the knowledge
of what Captain James Cook's "discovery" has meant for all who
reside here, these prints betray the colonizing impulse of early travelers
and explorers, provoking us to acknowledge and to mourn the consequences
of these invasions. A
question: Have we become a culture of forgetting? For to forget is to
comply with the selective erasures of social memory. Those who are absent
and the acts committed against them, persist in the culture as ghosts:
the repressed contents of history. "History" haunts us, and
although the past appears cold and obsolete as a bone, at its hollow center
burns a conflagration. What Chan seems to be doing is splitting the terra
firma of the past to reveal an underlying furnace of actions and decisions
that continue to give off heat and have repercussions on both the present
and, potentially, the future. Further
along, we come to a series of photographs that resemble flaming islands
afloat in a black sea. In one pair, a man photographs himself as a parade
passes down Kalakaua Avenue. In another, a woman walks up a gangplank
toward her expectations. In a kind of Rorschach moment, we as viewers
are asked to interpret what we see before us. Our responses, then, become
a litmus test of where we situate ourselves between the oppressor/oppressed.
What role(s) do we play in this drama of reversals, this looking-glass
world in which we live? The
exhibition continues with a gestural meditation on vadium vivum, another
phrase for mortgage. In each print the deep red hue incarnates feelings
of suspicion and alarm. Here and there, hot spots erupt from the fibers,
illuminating key details of an illicit exchange: a kiss, a handshake,
a paper document, a golden cup. Thousands of pin pricks rupture the surface,
giving shape to hands engaged in attitudes of ritual or prayer. Drawn
from negatives made in the 1970s by realty and insurance firms, these
prints are then layered with imagery inspired by 16th to 18th century
Christian paintings. A visual palimpsest, this series depicts transactions
made between ordinary people and agents of power—realtors and creditors.
Land, a generator of life, becomes understood as a symbol of security,
thus making the transference of property sacred. But from Chan's point
of view, how do we pledge that which no one can own? Who pays the never
ending debt? Although
linear in design, Chan's visual narrative does not end when wall space
runs out. Row after row of money flicker and burn, but never exhaust or
reduce to ash. Through carefully orchestrated imagery, Chan renders the
futility of amnesia. The photographs one finds hanging on the walls of
hospitals, government buildings, and 24-hour diners, promote primarily
two sentiments: a nostalgic yearning for simpler times, and a celebration
of "progress" as defined by consumer culture. According to Chan,
both confirm the inflexible ways in which linear time is commonly portrayed
and understood, that past is past, dead and gone. In this light, Flagrante
Delicto offers up an alternative timeline, one that is not framed by past/present
or then/now, but rather as future |