In collaboration with Meg Bisineer
"But if glass transmits, it also reflects. And so the window is experienced as a mirror as well – something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being. Flowing and freezing; glace in French means glass, mirror, and ice; transparency, opacity, and water."
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
Layers of white paint are gradually applied to the window of a seventh-floor London studio, creating a translucent projection screen for video images of a lapping shoreline. As night falls and the room darkens the waves emerge in the glass panes, configuring illusory scenes in which city and sea combine.
The piece is binary in many aspects: a collaboration between two filmmakers and a dialogue over two monitors. Counterpoints of inside/outside, intimacy/expanse, reflection/projection and changeability/control were important in the development of the project. Repetitive mark-making and automated photography regulated our actions as we worked in (and inhabited) the room; but from this system came shifting, unstable images that were new, surprising and outside our control.
PLAY (00:05:15)
Meghana Bisineer and Michaela Nettell, 2011. Photo: Installation view at the Saison Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, London, June 2011.