A Disproportionate Subtitle

Tia Madden

“El original es infiel a la traducción [the original is unfaithful to the translation.]”

Jorge Luis Borges (1943) Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford [On William Beckford’s Vathek]

We find the shadow like a subtitle, skirting the borders of reality. It is a cursory translation of the original, and as such, can only exist in tandem with something tangible. Each projection is an estimate, moulding light around its source, creating a cast to extend onto a surface. It is the unpredictability of light meeting surface, however, that underlines its propensity for mimicry rather than precision. It instead harnesses the power to disorient. The surface, then, is a screen that the shadow captions, and reality is trapped mutely in a blend of the fictive and the real.

Cast brings together a group of artists and writers whose work enters this darkened space, through a broad engagement with the invariable behaviours of the shadow. The exhibition takes the shadow’s role as a mimic, a double, a projection, and an obscurity as a point of entry, to explore how visual ambiguities and metaphorical darknesses harness our interactions with places, people, and perception.

Shadows impose darkness, but shade invites a reprieve from light. An area of shade is still well lit, though it creates a distinct environmental shift. A shift in temperature, a sudden consciousness of the breeze: it is one of the few times you can be in two places at once. On the same field, in the same city, watching the same game: but someone is within; and someone is without. Take a series of rock pools: the surface of stone remains constant, but shaded overhangs become portals to underwater ecosystems. The presence of shade enacts a literal translation of space.

Subtitles and closed captions assert the credibility of what you see and hear in film. Textual indications of sound - soft whistling, shuddering breath, howling wind - operate by translating one sense into another. In this way, the filmic narrative is condensed further into the two-dimensional plane, and a reliance is placed on those words to carry its weight. Inevitably, a margin for error is drawn here. No translation is identical to its original; or rather, “the original is unfaithful to the translation.”[1] The shadow behaves similarly. It grounds you in a physical realm, creates a space where you can trust your surroundings as surrounding shadows interlace with yours. To be left solely with shadows, then, as though an exercise in shadow-puppetry, would leave us with little information to accurately perceive reality. If we were to watch a film of subtitles and captions alone, at what point would an independent narrative take shape? If we fail to notice the distortion, does the error take place at all?

The shadow speaks to a presence: it cannot copy that which is absent, and so any darkness hovering over a mind is a deeply present weight. Such shadows of one’s mentality are co-dependent copies until they are not. A translation taking on a life of its own, learning your every move so that it might replicate them. Doppelgängers and double-walkers assume a similar fate, “…to dominate, control, and usurp the functions of the subject.”[2]  Under circumstances where we allow those shadows the agency, those darknesses might succeed at subsisting within us. Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Shadow’ sees this exact scenario, a role reversal ensuing: a detached shadow becomes a man, and a man becomes a shadow.[3] We cannot, then, expect metaphorical darknesses to surpass the same instinct. A bright day can be overcast, a mind can be overshadowed, and a darkness can take control.

It is human to have a shadow, just as it is human to dwell within them; but in shade, ours is consumed by another. Such all-encompassing darkness imbues a landscape of fear by blanketing us in a shared shadow, individuals no longer discernibly singular, their proof of presence diluted. These darkened spaces, like cinemas, immerse you temporarily in the make-believe, bending light to bend fictions. The absence of light equates to the absence of visual details, leaving the mind “…free to conjure up images… upon the slenderest perceptual cues.”[4]  The presence of individual shadows, therefore, testifies the presence of physical objects to dispel the mind’s phantasms. There is a reason we turn to nightlights to curb such cautionary fears of the dark: it gives us power over nature; a casting of shadows like a casting of a spell; our fear of an all-consuming darkness, if only temporarily, subdued.

As misrepresentations of truth, myths invite us to dwell in darkness. Grounded in fact, a myth is a warning or moral tale, and we absorb them like we absorb cinema: we allow a certain suspension of disbelief; become willing accomplices to blurry narratives. Such tales blur lines the way shadow-puppets combine silhouettes, a blending of figures to create a believable counterpart of reality. They emerge as a narrativised shelter, one “…built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and doubt.”[5] They are as much shadows as they are imitations of reality. They begin with a steady withdrawal of detail - a quiet dimming of the lights - and evolve as copies of copies traversing centuries, cultures and continents.

However fleeting, however transient, a cast remains a trace of a presence. There is no all-inclusive symbolism for the shadow, but its driving characteristic - to divide and to emulate - occurs quietly and unwittingly. Cast speaks to the shift between tangible and not: to search for a shadow and find a hazy reflection of its host; to be swallowed by shade, and find a place of new proportions.

Tia Madden, 2023

‘A Disproportionate Subtitle’ was written as the curatorial essay for the ‘Cast’ exhibition, held at Mounted ARI from June 24th - July 9th 2023

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Notes:

  1. Jorge Luis Borges, Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford [On William Beckford’s Vathek] 1943

  2. Tony Fonseca, ‘The Doppelgänger’, from Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of our Worst Nightmares, ed. S. T. Joshi, 2006

  3. Hans Christian Anderson, ‘Skyggen’ [‘The Shadow’] from Nye Eventyr. Andet Bind. Første Samling [New Fairy Tales. Second Volume. First Collection], 1847

  4. Yi -Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, Pantheon Books, New  York, 1979

  5. Yi -Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, Pantheon Books, New  York, 1979