ISLAND
Porcelain, Video projection
4''x 4''x 1.5''
2009
Island
The wind blows upon a translucent world. The houses in the islands, the invisible people in them, oscillate and vacillate... they refract your thoughts. They rise up towards being; they dissolve into nothingness. They reunite and they disperse. The wind blows and sends you adrift, distances you from the object you were contemplating. You seek the size of the subject in your imagination but it eludes you. Infinite things flow freely in your reverie, but you can arrest none. You look at the tiny houses, their fragile islands, the light broken by forests, the shifting geography, the flowing water. You try to put everything together, but it escapes you. You listen to the wind blow.
Myriam Tapp’s work Island constitutes a seductive yet elusive experience. Sensations conduct the spectator through a stream that never stops: she is induced into reverie. Without a concrete subject upon which to fix his attention, the viewer constantly displaces his gaze, draws his mind onto something different, seeks to unveil another idea or memory. Every moment there is something new that appeals to him or her. Experiencing the work becomes an eventful journey across the substances of the mind, through imagination and memory. Instead of resting on an island, our psyche crawls through the interstices that separate subjective states. Our own mental process becomes integrated into the content of the work.
Our subjectivity, the lenses through which we refract and interpret what we apprehend, is that ever shifting current of air and water. it is what separates the islands, the houses, the people. Yet, it is also what unites them.
by Gustavo Larach