Sally Golding

Two-way mirror sheeting (1800mm x 3000mm); 2 x DMX lights; data projector; sound composition; custom software; viewer reflections

Your Double My Double Our Ghost takes representation and the Double as a starting point by considering a psychical excursion of heautoscopy and autoscopy - two known conditions in psychiatry and neurology, the first in which one has a feeling of seeing one’s own body at a distance, and the second in which an individual perceives the surrounding environment from a different perspective.

In designing a composition for light and sound, Golding introduced a flexible silver two-way mirror as the centrepiece of the room, inviting viewers to interact with it much in the same way as with a funfair mirror. In playing with heautoscopy, the viewer may not see their own reflection when looking in the mirror, or their image may only be seen by others, or perhaps when doubled with another viewer they may consider themselves as an Other. By opening up a contemplative space or hallucinatory fantasy, the work has characteristics based around imaginary perceptions and perceptual distortions of the Self.

To construct the installations Golding collaborated with software programmer, artist and electronic musician Spatial (Matt Spendlove), to explore new platforms for representing generative and cyclical systems for audiovisual playback. These processes invite chance and serendipity, enabling a viewer experience that may be different each time.

“Instead of seeing his own image reflected, his vision appeared to him to extend indefinitely… I could perceive quite plainly what appeared to be a ray of light emitted from my epigastrium, which illuminated objects in the room.” - The Mystery Of The Human Double - The case for astral projection, Ralph Shirley, 1938

COMMISSION
Exhibition premiere at South London Gallery, UK, 2016

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Read the SLG exhibition guide

EXHIBITIONS
Insomnia Festival at Centre Tromsø Kunstforening (Tromsø Contemporary Art Centre), Norway

RESIDENCY
Developed during ‘Embedded’ - a Sound and Music composer and creative artist development programme funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

TECHNICAL CREDITS
Custom software by UK artist, electronic musician and creative technologist Matt Spendlove (Spatial).

Projector and lighting solutions and installation by multi-visual designer Dizqo.

COLLABORATOR
Matt Spendlove (aka Spatial) is a an electronic musician and multimedia artist from London exploring low frequency vibration with physical intervention through DJ & live performance on Sound Systems and via recorded media, the structural occupation and perception of opti-sonic transmissions through home coded audiovisual installations and the emergent behaviour of chaotic systems by simple rule based repetition through generative design.
mattspendlove.com
www.cenatus.org

Single 16mm film loop 6mins in portrait 3:4; two-way mirror; frosted glass laminate; lighting mixer & lights; camera flash units activated by sensors; electromagnetic pick up; sound composition; audience reflection

Sally Golding works in ‘expanded cinema’, combining film-making with installation and performance. Her work recalls phantasmagorias, the proto-cinematic ‘ghost shows’ first developed in France in the late eighteenth century. For these spectacles, a modified magic lantern would be used to project scary images of skeletons, ghosts, and demons onto walls, smoke and semi-transparent screens, frequently using rear projection. For her installation Out of Body Out of Mind, Golding rear-projects a 16mm film loop of images of ‘the dead’ onto a screen made of sheets of frosted glass and a two-way mirror. As lights flash in the space, viewers will see their own reflections superimposed upon the film projection, becoming ‘ghosts’ themselves. The soundtrack is a collage of musings on the mind and body drawn from old instructional and sound-effects records. A gothic play on presence and absence, the embodied and the virtual, life and death, the work is, like the phantasmagoria itself, neatly situated at the crossroads of science and superstition, philosophy and pulp. – Institute of Modern Art


COMMISSION
Commission and exhibition premiere for Fresh Cut, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2010


MEDIA
Listen to the audio as used in the installation

Read an audience members experience of the exhibition in this blog post: Fresh Cut 2010, by Nobody in the Art World

2 × 16mm film projectors & film loop plates with 3min film loops; two-way mirror; frosted glass laminate; lighting mixer & lights; electromagnetic pick up; audience reflection

Live-cinema artist Sally Golding harnesses the behaviour and properties of light and plays with the classic iconography of the mirror. Her work An Other Face: Spell for Living and Dying sits within her series of film performances and film installations based on the idea of ‘autoscopic hallucination’. In autoscopic hallucination, one sees one’s self as an external object, which can lead to the delusion that one has a double. In folklore and literature, the double (or doppelganger) is a symbolic embodiment of a troubled self or a phantom, and is a means of examining one’s own existence – be it as alive or dead. However, in the everyday, autoscopic hallucination is a form of dangerous disorientation. Previously, Golding has addressed autoscopic hallucination by projecting images onto her own body while exploring a variety of optical functions, such as reflection and refraction. In An Other Face, she projects onto the spectator, making them a screen – an integral component of the work. Such reorganisation of cinematic elements into installation form redesigns the cinematic viewing experience, exposing the typically locked process of beam-audience-screen. – Independent Exhibitions

COMMISSION
Commissioned by Independent Exhibitions, Brisbane, Australia, 2009