Excerpt from "...after the fact" a review by Barry Kehoe

 

"Another work that explores the idea of observation, surveillance and the boundaries between the world as divided into interior private spaces and exterior public encounter is the work of Jill French, Negotiating Boundaries of Intrusion (2012). This installation gave the visitor the sensation of the conspiratorial intrusion into the private world of others, taking care of course not to reveal any factual or identifiable information regarding the human subjects of the secret observation. The sound work was particularly intriguing and activated the participant to lean into the speakers as the volume dipped, giving the sensation of being an eavesdropper as one tried to glean a snippet of intelligible conversation. To be a spy is to be covert, it is to be unseen like the wandering ghost in this exhibition of memory, free to float from room to room observing and yet unobserved behind the mask of a false identity. The surveillance equipment is the ghost of the secondary observer who is present in the experiment through the documenting of the secreted device. In this way the visitor to the exhibition becomes that ghost without the moral dilemma or the actual danger of having to physically intrude into the lives of others. This work explores curiosity, a basic element of human character, that drives the species forward to discover the secrets of our universe and develop new technologies and improve our conditions of life. There is a certain innocence and naivety sometimes in the position of wonderment that this curiosity, often associated with childhood, instills within the human psyche. However, there is a much more sinister element to the act of spying, interfering, acquiring knowledge of another persons private life, thoughts or actions. This intrusion can be viewed as something unethical, sordid, and a transgression of decent human behaviour. Curiosity is an all too human trait and it serves humanity well, but as in the morality tale of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, once we transgress we cannot undo what we have done, once we look we cannot unlook. What we see and experience changes us forever. Perhaps the unnerving reflection on this revealing work is that some keyholes are better left unexplored.

In this exhibition of the memory we enter and leave the nexus in a rhizomatic way. There is no order or set sequence to this journey. We can pull together random strands of thought and experience, intertwine them and dissolve them again at will."