Édouard Vuillard. Mother and Sister of the Artist (Mère et soeur de l'artiste), 1893; oil on canvas, 18.25 x 22.25 in. (46.3 x 56.5 cm).

In the 1893 painting Mother and Sister of the Artist, by Édouard Vuilllard, a young female figure presses her hands and legs against the wall behind her and leans forward toward the center of the painting. The pattern of her dress blends with that of the wallpaper, and this partial dissolution between figure and ground-- this camouflaging--suggests either her desire to be swallowed up and disappear, or conversely, her attempt to escape the surroundings that threaten to engulf her. Vuillard, it seems, was not as concerned with painting a family portrait as with staging the domestic setting that both governed and embodied their familial life. He wrote in his journal of his effort to convey "how the self could merge conceptually and aesthetically with its surroundings yet still respond to the unforeseeable demands of emotion and incident."1

I immediately recalled Vuillard's painting upon entering Twice Upon a Time, a group exhibition on view at Silverman Gallery through April 11. The exhibition's title references the repeat occurrence of the show--at Silverman and Galerie Andreas Huber in Vienna-- as well as the title of historian E. W. Harries' book that explores the ways in which 17th century female writers subverted societal expectations and the domestic sphere through fairy tales. The unifying thread amongst the included artists--and the connecting interest between the two galleries--is engagement in conceptual and performance-based practices that disrupt and undermine conventional narratives of gender or identity.

But my first observation of the exhibition was that the work had been relegated to the perimeter of the room, while the center was left open. Although there are hardly alternatives to a wall for hanging two-dimensional art, the empty space of the gallery was conspicuous because the window installation, video, and slideshow pieces were located in the corners. The art registered its presence, but the exhibition's installation pushed it to the periphery of participation. As a result, I felt the work almost palpably leaning out into the space, each piece capable of occupying more that what it had been given.

However, simultaneously undermining and reinforcing the installation is the fact that boundaries recurrently emerged as narrative and visual constructs within the works themselves. Outlined texts and figures, geographic striations, versos of photographs, and the image of the back of a woman's head all reinforced the idea that the works of art themselves are the boundary lines between the interior life of their subjects and the exterior world. Through primarily text-based and photographic work, but also through performance, installation, drawing, and video, the artists have moved away from the domestic domain of Vuillard's painting, but continue to stage spaces whose meanings are indistinguishable from the lives unfolding or performed within them.

Carla Åhlander. Untitled, 2003; C-print on MDV; edition of 5 + 1 AP; 47.2 x 31.5 in.

For example, Kaucyila Brooke draws in outline the names of lesbian bars in San Francisco, an ongoing project begun in 2007. The list's arrangement creates quick, saucy narratives, but the partial shading of some names also implies a coded system whose relevance and recognition requires experiential knowledge. The viewer is left to decipher whether the names are commemorating places that fostered queer communities or if the compilation suggests a more personal search for identity. Similarly navigating themes of introspection and shifting perceptions is Carla Åhlander's untitled photograph (2003), in which a young woman, clad in a tracksuit jacket and faded jeans, stands at a ship's deck rail, looking away from the camera. We encounter her from the side, and are granted an unfocused view of a lifeboat in the distance, but not of what else may have caught her attention. Unable to share in her gaze, she becomes the object of our contemplation; whatever inner rumination the figure might be engrossed in is supplanted by the one we project onto her.

Tammy Rae Carland. Untitled (photoback), 1997-2007; color photograph; edition of 3; 11 x 11 in.

A similar, but more nuanced staging occurs with Tammy Rae Carland's Untitled (photobacks) series from 1997-2007, photographs of the backs of found snapshots, in which only the slightest shadow of the image on the other side is discernible. Instead, the handwritten notes recording the event or impression of it stands in for the image, and therefore the whole experience or memory. Read collectively, "This is the one you didn't see me take"; "Sunset"; and "Atop the Eiffel (half-way). That's me" carry enough emotional resonance that they cease to be recovered fragments from an anonymous life, and instead substantiate a constructed life that had no existence prior to Carland's assembly.

Narrative often possesses a serial nature, the following of one thing to another, each a variation on a set of precepts. In Carola Dertnig's Dance Report-LA Report (2008), a projection of eighty slides, fractured phrases obtusely reference choreography, poetical recitation, and getting stuck in traffic. The overlapping qualities of each--particularly delineation and progression--resonate with the slow, repetitive clicking over from one slide to another, and regardless of the absence of any linear narrative, a set of images emerge from the text.

However, Christine McPhee's series of drawings, 47 reds from 2000, follows in form with the rest of the work, but not in effect. If held to Vuillards's assertion, the drawings may, through gesture, meld aesthetics and concept, but yield little insight into the demands of emotion and intent. For that, one turns to Desiree Holman's 2005 video I would do almost anything you asked me to do, in which the artist, in the format for which she has become known, dons ill-fitting handmade masks to occupy the roles of multiple characters. Here the characters are all men, all played by her (evidenced by the hair visible beneath the masks), waltzing to overwrought, sentimental music. The fantastical space the characters occupy meld with the presumed intentions; the artist is both leading and wooed partner, at once vulnerable and in control.

Diagonally across the room from Holman's video is Ginger Wolfe-Suarez's window installation, which assembles poetry, dirt, and layers of brightly colored, hand-dyed clothes into a statement about introspective excavation. The two works anchor the room physically but also as the most overt examples of the potential for constructing narrative and the space in which that narrative is performed or plays out. However, Holman's digital space is somehow much more accessible than Wolfe-Suarez's actual, demarcated one, as it reinforces the extent to which fantasy and interiority are entwined. Carland, Brooke and Åhlander also teases out access to ulterior existences that are delineated by the ways they are also externally shielded, but through gestures that are much more subtle. The themes of Twice Upon a Time prevail in their works, where narrative and stage merge visually and conceptually into a united subject.

1. Sidlauskas, Susan.
Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Twice Upon a Time is on view at Silverman Gallery through April 11, 2009.