Shelagh Alexander: The Somnambulist (1985)

A catalogue text for the group exhibition Artistes canadiennes/Canadian Women Artists at the Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris (September 27 - November 24, 1985) and Canada Houose, London (January - March 1986), pp. 21, 23.

The Somnambulist

The images in The Somnambulist series were all collected from the films of the forties, when women appeared and disappeared in the workforce and were fetishized in films. This appearance and disappearance in history is represented within this series of compilation photographs by the figure of the sleepwalker who is absent in her presence. Present as an image and absent as a subject of history, the sleepwalker fluctuates as a sender and receiver of images. This vacillation is marked further by the interweaving of the fictional and nonfictional in the shallow space of the image. This space can be taken as both a critical and subjective screen on which fragmented images are projected, just as the figure of the sleepwalker is the subjective site for society’s construction of the position of women and a fragile body for the registration of that society’s images.

The compilation method Shelagh Alexander uses allows diverse film images to be brought together in a single photographic space, without the look of cut and paste of collage, which keeps it within the bounds of film language. It maintains the seamless surface of the fetishized film still, but reveals that even when an image is withdrawn from the context of a film it still carries a narrative encoded in its representational relations. While in film, narrative is played out over time, now it is splayed over the surface of the photographic image. Narrative effects are intensified by this repetition, superimposition and condensation of images. And since no one film or type is used (cartoons and melodrama mingle in the same frame, for instance), the effects are repeated across the field of film in a series of gestures and looks. Together they compose a typology that could be said to correspond to a symptomology of that period’s social structure, a structure reinforced by dominant cinema. What Shelagh Alexander presents in The Somnambulist is not only the power of the image, and its pressure on the individual, but a pathology as well.

That dominance of cinema and the media is partially interrupted here by a display of the mechanisms of film and by that typology which directs the viewer to a genealogy of societal representations. But by rearticulating the space and relations of the image, other representations ensue. A critique is made but a space is opened for intervention, and in that opening new positions are taken.