In Place

Have you ever walked into an empty building and felt that it was haunted — not that it was full of horror-movie ghosts, but that it was somehow stained by the past? It could have been residue from previous occupants. Or maybe it’s that buildings have their own personae, created by builders and shaped by occupants and the forces of time. Sisters Jane and Louise Wilson have a fixation with empty spaces, and in “Erewhon,” their new exhibition at Blaffer Gallery, they explore them through photographs and video.

Previous works by the Wilson sisters have included projects like Stasi City (1997), a video installation exploring the creepy interior of the East German secret police headquarters. The Wilsons eschewed the torture chambers, which were too obviously macabre, and focused in on long hallways and empty, decaying offices. It’s a psychically and historically loaded site — an estimated one in six East Germans worked for the Stasi, as either actual employees or informants. The sisters also have focused on locations as diverse as Russia’s Star City, the Hoover Dam and Las Vegas casinos, seeking to transmit a tangible, unsettling sense of place.

For Erewhon (2004), the sisters went to New Zealand and filmed an abandoned mine and a defunct sanatorium/former shell-shock hospital, along with the country’s landscape. The resulting installation uses the Blaffer’s problematic two-story central space better than any show in a long time. The room is completely dark with two tall assemblages made from giant video screens and mirrors. If you walk into the center of the room, you’re surrounded by images of multiple scenes on different planes and at different angles.

On various screens, cameras peer into and slowly enter rooms with stacks of old mattresses and aged enamel pails. They also enter rooms filled with the metal frames and springs of narrow institutional beds — ascetic, grimly functional objects that provided practical warehousing for infirm bodies. The ceiling screen shows the sisters’ shots of peeling ceilings and circular pans of an octagonal roof, and the mirror above the screen works especially well, reflecting the same video at intersecting angles.

Another screen shows a room (from the mine site?) that bears graffiti on Sheetrock pocked with holes. A shot from the sanatorium depicts a picture of the queen over a soot-blackened fireplace with a boxing bag lying on the floor, as if it has finally been defeated. The camera records an abundance of horrifically patterned carpets, a British colonial legacy from that genre of cheap grim British interior that’s one of the most hideously depressing the in world — surpassing even Soviet Bloc interiors. The title Erewhon is taken from a novel by Samuel Butler, an 1872 social satire of Victorian hypocrisy. The interiors of the Wilsons’ film call to mind primly callous institutional rigidity.

The images are interspersed with scenes of nature along with evidence of its pillaging, like the shot of a mining camp building’s skeletal structure standing in a lake of stagnant water. Added into this mix are a staged series of scenes inspired by vintage photographs of girls’ exercise classes from the 1910s and ’20s. Following World War I and the loss of thousands of young men from its already scant population, New Zealand became enthralled with eugenics and the idea of a genetically superior population. Exercise regimes were instituted for young women, the bearers of the future populace. There was an obsession with physical fitness not unlike Germany’s Aryan superiority craze fueled by the ideas of 19th-century German gym teacher Turnvater Jahn.

Here, rather than exploring environments, the Wilsons are staging scenes. Groups of girls are shown wearing quasi-period one-piece gym costumes. They hold gymnastic poses, barely moving. They’re frozen, hanging from the uneven bars, standing on their hands and climbing ropes. The most effective scenes are the ones played on the ceiling screens. Filmed from below, they show a taut figure holding herself between parallel bars or moving and climbing up a knotted rope; the camera angle and the screen placement work well.

But overall, the gymnastics scenes are more boring than intriguing. It’s like the Wilsons have taken a page from Vanessa Beecroft and her videos of identically dressed women all standing still and staring vacantly. The staged scenes just don’t have the evocative power of the more documentary images. They aren’t weird enough; they’re just distracting. The gym is obviously contemporary, but it doesn’t feel like it’s supposed to be.

You start noticing other details; the black stockings the girls wear aren’t remotely turn-of-the-century — they’re nylon knee-highs. The women’s “period” hair and makeup are off and unconvincing. It’s like the Wilsons were shooting for something but didn’t have the wardrobe and makeup people to really pull it off. Once you start to compete with the viewer’s vast experience with high-production-value period films, anything that isn’t bad on purpose becomes distracting. It isn’t realistic enough to be convincing, and it isn’t bad and over-the-top enough to be campy.

The Wilsons have a gift for honing in on and capturing the essences of places. It comes through in the exhibition of large-scale photographs that accompanies the video installation. Images from Erewhon, as well as the Wilsons’ photographs of a Galveston oil rig platform and a microchip factory, radiate a palpable sense of place. The Erewhon video installation is fascinating; its scenes are highly evocative. While conceptually the gym scenes may tie into the Wilsons’ explorations of attitudes toward humanity and nature, their execution is problematic. The Wilsons’ work is far more effective when they let places speak for themselves.