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A now infamous legend by Ancient Roman philosopher, author and naturalist, Pliny the Elder, tells the story of how Dibutades, on the eve of her lover’s venture into war, marked the contour of his head on a wall, from the shadow cast by a burning lamp opposite the figure.  This act, in order to memorise the departed man by creating his silhouette, has become a metaphor for mark making and in time the photographic and cinematic image.  This act of projection, both in an actual and figurative sense, has been at the core of our understanding of how images are created.  Janine Davidson’s varied practice, which includes film, video, installation and photography, takes the baton of Dibutades’ apparatus, in which the strategies of projection, framing and screening are made evident in her pictorial experimentation.  Davidson’s work often uses memory as a starting point in its creation and conception. Her repeated use of contested geographical locations with subjective associations for both the viewer and the artist can trigger and challenge notions of commemoration, familiarity and remembrance through the use of specific sites and locations.

The artist makes use of optical devices, both existing and invented, to draw our mind’s eye and pinpoint its gaze towards the interface between meaning and perception. The repeated presence of obstructions and apertures and the boundary between screen and viewer, constitutes an essential component of Davidson’s vista.  We are often invited to peer beyond the screen through the gap, skewing, and squinting.  Her works allow us to peek through the ‘looking glass’, to uncover how the visual trickery is achieved. “A screen is a barrier,” wrote philosopher Stanley Cavell in 1971. “It screens me from the world it holds – that is, screens its existence from me”.  Davidson’s film and photographic work moderates and mediates this barrier.  Her screens invite us into worlds where a personal vantage point for the viewer is offered.  

Through editing, looping and repetition, her moving image work creates an awareness of difference between the passing of real time and represented time.  It permits the viewer to rely on our own personal memories when engaging with the work.  Davidson could be considered as working within the field of what has come to be known as ‘Expanded Cinema’.  However, ‘Expanded Cinema’ is not just a question of using many screens, or just taking the light beam into the gallery space.  The key difference is whether or not a work is predetermined, is already made, as the record of an event that has previously taken place, and so can be recognized independently of its projected instantiation, or whether it is made in and through its projection.  The work in essence initiates the drama in the film process, where the material of form, its nuances and practicalities are revealed.  

In addition to Davidson’s moving image work, she also creates still photography. In both forms there is a common sensibility.  Photography is used in various outcomes, be it in the initial pre-production location scout or in the eventual presentation of the composed photographic shot as a product of extended research into site, space and composition.   One such work is  Engaña (2014) a photograph from the Túnel de la Engaña located in Northern Spain.  It is no coincidence that engaña translates as to deceive a synonym for to obscure.  

On first glance, the composition immediately reminds one of a traditional triptych painting, a pictorial device repeated throughout the art historical canon, particularly in Renaissance religious painting where the middle panel, typically the largest is flanked by two smaller images often intersecting the narrative of a figurative scene.  In Davidson’s photograph the vista of a landscape is dissected to create a trinocular perspective.  This trinity of outlooks are illuminated and projected from this dark man-made formation, a stone structure with a vaulted ceiling becomes our auditorium, our cinema, where we are invited to look beyond the screen into a much more welcoming panorama.  The scene of a mountainous topography with its diagonal cliff transecting our view suggests a reference to painterly composition and to the fact that the image is not a mere postcard snap-shot, but a prudent view by the artist.

This photograph draws to mind an earlier dual projection video installation entitled Hyde and Seek (2011), in which the artist stalks a particular site with her lens.  In this work the image is further confounded by the fact that the landscape captured is of the North/South Irish border, a site of surveillance and security.  The perhaps innocent or hobbyist activity (from this hyde) immediately becomes more sinister by the context that surrounds the geographical location of the scene. Amplified by a certain political moment, the installation places the viewer in an anxious position where both site and history can alter our understanding of the image presented.  

The changing contours of memory are of interest to Davidson, amplified by both context and sense of place.  Her work draws our attention to what we look at versus what we see, what memories we retain and what we discard, what is obscured and what is laid bare. How an image is framed affects our perception and understanding of how we engage with it.  Site and the use of particular architectures both geological and manmade, retain shadows, memories and secrets, in Davidson’s work we are invited to explore the gradations and balance of both illumination and shadows.

Mondloch, Kate (2010) Screens – Viewing Media Installation Art, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Introduction, p. xii