Sometimes memory opens an eye at the sight of a small ripple on the water, sometimes upon hearing a sound or a word. These have the power to generate a story and bring it to life through the prop of memory and the counting of dance steps.
Lee Yanor brings different realms of remembrance together, both personal and cultural, delving into the fragile relationship between movement and the suspension of time. The images’ emergence and disappearance pulsate in her work like memory threads. Henri Bergson observed that accumulations of data, unconscious for the most part, join to form a stream of memories. This “pure recollection” or “pure memory” (mémoire pure) is mainly dependent on consciousness and the spirit, and preserves the traces of the past, while effectuating the flow of life.
Yanor invites us to embark on a sweeping odyssey of intense moments alongside moments of pause, challenging the power of the image to explore memory using a language comprising a multitude of qualities, which is translated into multiple strata and dimensions. Her installation calls for wandering underlain by a sense of fragmentation. The viewer’s gaze perceives multiple segments and flickering images through their simultaneous song. The dialectic between photography, dance, and an abstract choreography is woven into the photographs of movement. Appearing intermittently, the body awakens, spreads its arms and legs like a marionette, moves almost by inner necessity.
The only certain thing in this installation—implied in the title of the exhibition, “Come About” (in the sense of a discontinuous forward movement of a boat)—is the rain that constantly falls on the living body, the space, and nature, threatening in its black shades. It is accompanied by the seascape, whose surface and stories likewise change in the course of the work.
Yanor raises questions about the deconstruction of the body into matter and the destruction of the linearity of language in the course of an abstract journey that may be likened to a spectral realm marked by forgetfulness and doubts.
