Fragments of a Work in Progress: Aspects of My Father's House

An Image Darkly Forming: Victoria Lewis and the Name of the Father

“The image alone is the immediate object of knowledge.” – C.G. Jung, Medicine and Psychotherapy

The dream-like images which emerge from the backdrop of Victoria Lewis’s environmental installation Fragments of a Work in Progress: Aspects of My Father’s House are akin to oneiric wraiths which haunt us with memories of another time, another place. Images therein achieve the hallucinatory clarity of the dream. We are entangled in a fragmented but cohesive narrative web central to which, we suspect, are the artist’s own rites of initiation. These rites then seem to us as mysterious as they are moving, perhaps because they are effective metaphors for her own psychic transformation and rebirth. Her images are made knowable at the varying empathic thresholds of her viewers.

The fragments “tree,” “coat,” and “dress” seem to inhabit an insulated core within the outer limit of the photographic images like some shimmering interior nimbus. The images constitute a fractured armature – the architectural signposts of a domestic environment – suffused with traces of violation and abjection. The interior fragments are shored up against their ruin by these outlying photographic elements of a remembered or wholly fictional place. The fragments play off the photographic images and vice versa. Here, dialect is everything.

The images of “house,” “gate,” “sink,” “window,” “interior,” “ledge,” “interior stairs,” “mattress,” and “shoes” accrete sense to the whole and serve to charge the objects which are obviously their matrix and secret heart with an almost instinctual cathexis. They are at once puzzling, evocative, fugitive, and always redolent with a self-knowledge perhaps hard-won. They make us reflect. They are riven with jouissance. If they are dreams, they are dreams we are invited to live, for they integrate and express nothing less than the idiom of the self.

Of the work exhibited at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Lewis writes:

When doing the work... I was involved in Jungian dream analysis, the point being to bring areas of the unconscious into light. The images in the show were taken in the mid-1980s when I lived in Essex County, an area of southwestern Ontario largely surrounded by water. I used to describe the activity of driving around the county looking for images that made me faint as ‘cruising,’ searching for the site of bliss. [1]

It is not without interest that Lewis was intensely involved in Jungian dream analysis while cruising for images which were to feed these works. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that, for this artist, her oneiric tableaux represent a fiction in which the idiom of her own selfhood is expressed freely, albeit disjunctively and with a deftly drawn dramatic aura, hence yielding an eerie frisson that may well prefigure a future yet to be lived. In any case, it is clear that herein the fiction, the dream, precedes and in a sense prefigures the factuality of the present moment.

This above-quoted passage is revealing, for if finding images are to Lewis as necessary as breathing, then she meticulously chooses those which are fraught with portents of self-knowledge and embodied memory as palpably emotional icons of the interior life. The reference to water is particularly relevant here, as it is in Jungian psychology, and it is not coincidental that there are many who have described the resurrection of the dead as a rebirth from water. According to Jung, water is a potent image of the collective unconscious. As we circumnavigate Aspects of My Father’s House, with its deliberately dim lighting, there is little doubt that we have been invited to peruse nocturnal and perhaps repressed states of the soul. The work has been imbued by the artist with an emotional authenticity and limned with dream, ecstasy, trance – and transformation.

Furthermore, Lewis positions her imagery in a way relatable to the observer so that it acquires a peculiarly fluid character which binds it to the water aspect of the unconscious. Just as readily, it weds itself to archetypes which make a powerful impression on the viewer as she/he assimilates the installation.

There is also, one suspects, a darker and more unsettling subtext here, in which the abjection suffered under the aegis of the father is thematised, and the transcendent interprets itself to the personal.

Lewis’s work involves transmuting images into similes for psychic events which are highly charged and thus accessible to our own inner experience. This is the nature of her alchemy. There is an implicit, even incisive criticism of patriarchy here, and certainly an invocation of psychic incest and the pre-verbal. However, taken together the images constitute a sort of dream-like grid of still-life photographic images and sculpted fragments which perhaps trap unwelcome but varied meanings within the ambit of our own interpretation; they are open enough to solicit our own projections.

The dim lighting of the exhibition not only accommodates our contemplation of the work while enhancing its oneiric nature, but fleshes out the shadow aspect. I intend “shadow” in a specifically Jungian sense: the dark side of the personality made immediately present and real. Technically, it refers to that segment of the personality which has been repressed for the sake of the ego ideal. [2] In Aspects of My Father's House, the shadows which flock from everywhere represent the personal unconscious of the artist and, by extension, that of her viewers. It is thus a dark door which opens upon all the deepest transpersonal experiences. Of course, the shadow here also bears the name of the father, the agent of repression and subversion of self. This is interesting insofar as unconscious spontaneous representations of the shadow are usually personified by a figure of the same sex as the dreamer. [3] Of course, here there is a conscious representation on the artist’s part of the father, where the shadow takes on a decidedly phallocentric character. Marion Woodman writes:

Cut off outwardly from her environment, cut off inwardly from her positive masculine guide, the woman identifies with the dark side of the father archetype – the demon lover. There is no one to mediate between her terrorized ego and the chaos through which it is falling. The abyss is bottomless.. . [4]

Yet, if the house is haunted by a demon lover in the guise of the unforgiving father animus, it is also haunted by what we bring to it in the course of our observing, and so other ghosts seep outwards from deep within ourselves and colour the installation accordingly. Certainly, Aspects of My Father’s House represents a courageous attempt in art to defeat and vanquish the dark side of the tenacious archetype that resides at the core of the father complex. Here is the conscious exorcism of the demon lover and freedom from patriarchy. Here also is a fully nuanced zone for our own feelings and projections.

If the idiom of the self is Lewis’s first preoccupation, the shadow represents the primary stage of coming to terms with the self. Lewis knows well that there is no real access to the unconscious without taking the path through the shadow. This makes her work doubly meaningful, for she posits both the core dilemma and the possibility of reconciliation and relief after suffering.

Regarding her technique, Lewis says, “I have always worked from a still-life set-up.” [5] The still-lifes here (not only the isolated photographic images which bear a real relationship to still-life painting, but the isolated fragments which relate to them) are akin to dream fragments seized upon, amplified, and serialized in an installation sequence that adds up to a whole which radically exceeds the sum of its discrete parts. Lewis undermines the traditional conventions of still-life painting in her own still-lifes, using a free association technique to penetrate, implode and transcend the familiarity and stability of the scene, and using all auratic means possible to draw us into the dream.

But if it is a dream, Lewis’s objects are so cathected that they take on a certain dangerous clarity, reminding us of still-life’s kinship with illusionism and trompe l’oeil. What seems thrown together by chance soon assumes an orderly syntax and logic; the taken-for-granted aspect of domestic architecture becomes almost hyper-real. Norman Bryson writes:

Normally, painting controls the contents of the visual field by means of a sovereign gaze that subordinates everything in the scene to the human observer. But in trompe l’oeil it is as if that gaze had been removed, or had never been present: what we see are objects on their own, not as they are when people are around, but as they really are, left to their own devices. [6]

It may seem odd to liken Lewis’s in situ installation of objects and photographic images to trompe l’oeil. After all, this is not painting – although Lewis paints constantly alongside her other work and is dedicated to the still-life even in this work. The objects in question achieve a remarkable concretion that makes them suddenly threaten our place in the world. Bryson says:

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan talks of the way visual experience is never fully organised by a centralised ego; there is always an excess in vision over and beyond what the subject can master in sight. Trompe l 'oeil painting unfolds in exactly this area of insufficient control, where instead of the objects obeying the subject’s sovereign gaze, they slip out beyond it and usurp the visual field; they “look back” on the observer... [7]

This is exactly what happens here. The excess in vision is invoked. It threatens to displace us and undermine our station-point in space. Using what she may well intend as fragments of remembered place and imbuing them with auratic power, the fragments and images usurp our visual field, transgressing the usual hierarchy of categories, and waylaying us in the dream wherein the idiom of the self is played – with real virtuousity.

Christopher Bollas says that, “we may agree with Freud that a dreamer creates his future insofar as it is determined by a past, but we may add that the dream also constitutes a fictional forerunner of reality, in which the idiom of the self is played.” [8] He further argues that:

At the very least, then, the dream creates futures, visions of the self in transformed states that are nonetheless articulations of the individual, unique person... it is where some futures are hatched. It is the origin of vision, the place where the subject plays with objects, moving through potential patterns, setting up fields of imagined persons, places, selves and events to be there as potential actuals for future use. [9]

Lewis offers up the objects we must reclaim if we are to find the self. A future is delineated even as a past is vanquished; here is the origin of vision. Thus, there is no invocation of closure in Lewis’s unsettling installation.

Indeed, it is a tribute to the considerable openness and auratic plenitude of the artist’s confabulations that we too experience a sense of deja vu as we gain familiarity with her project. If the existential signature of the artist somehow becomes our own deeply felt signifier, an image darkly forming around the nimbus of our innermost selves induces an oceanic feeling and hints at darker revelations still. Here, concrete objects and the concretion of images are presented not radically isolated from life but containing the mysterium tremendum of life, of being. [10]

Victoria Lewis may be expressing her autobiographical consciousness or she may be conjuring compelling fictions which empower her viewer’s imaginative capacities. Be that as it may, in this work she demonstrates the emotional power of her installations as well as their phenomenal openness. This porosity is a trademark of work which, far from being hermetically sealed up with predetermined meanings, offers viewers considerable latitude in terms of interpretation of meaning and emotional participation. Lewis is an artist in search of her true self, but her work is adamantly anti-narcissistic and the mysterium tremendum is ever present. Her work’s range, polyvalence of meaning and potency of image mean we can all find a place – and a passage – for ourselves to linger in and perhaps learn from as we go down to the dark well.

James D. Campbell

Endnotes

1. Victoria Lewis, Letter to Linda Jansma, n.d.

2. Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest (New York: Putnam’s, 1969), p. 161.

3. Whitmont: 163.

4. Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin; A Process of Personal Transformation (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1985), p. 40.

5. Victoria Lewis, communication to the author, n.d.

6. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 143.

7. Bryson: 143-44.

8. Christopher Bollas, Forces of Destiny: Psychonanalysis and Human Idiom (London: Free Association Books, 1991), p. 47.

9. Bollas: 47.

10. Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 182.