being double, 2020, moving image, plinth, projector, gallery, dimensions variable in exhibtion ‘The Uncertainty of Knowing’ curated by Suzanne Close. [video and photography stills; reel excerpts of moving images]

Essay excerpt by Suzanne Close:

‘Through the moving image work being double, 2020, we view the vacant gallery space with a lone projector beaming from a plinth. The emptiness has become potent with promise as we glimpse the bustle of energy from the traffic and neon signage outside. Set at night, when thoughts multiply and make trouble for the restless mind, there is a Lynchian duality created by the mirrored room reflected in the window.

In viewing the work, we circumnavigate the illuminated lens, as if being continually asked to reposition our corporal and cerebral selves. It appears that our points of view are not only altered by great seismic shifts but in the earth’s subtle rotations. On closer inspection, we realise that the projector is both protagonist and the source of the moving image. Time and space appear to loop around each other as we experience the gallery from the outside and within. The boundaries between our inner selves and the outside world have been called into question.

Taalman’s work creates room for uncertainty to exist. As an artist, they elicit spatial encounters that are concerned with the construction of knowledge through embodied experiences. Through Taalman’s tactile and physical interventions of the gallery space, she disrupts our preconceived notions to create new layered and nuanced understandings of how we inhabit ourselves. This is a sensitively observed response to the physical and psychological site of the gallery.’ Read full catalogue