Wyn Geleynse

Wyn Geleynse is concerned with projection, evident in the many optical device and projected images in this exhibition. The four installations with their whirring film projectors, flickering image, and empty frames remind us of how vision and perception are structured. The act of looking - peering into the warehouse activating projectors - asserts our bodily presence and subjectivity as does the intimate scale. These assemblages of mundane objects have a modest constraint and even the film footage avoids cinematic spectacle. The tiny film projections inhabiting the tableaus are nevertheless intriguing and seductive. These "moving snapshots”, aa the artist calls them, frustrate the desire for narrative yet it is precisely their unresolved persistence that holds our attention. Through repetition, an everyday gesture is turned into obsessive behaviour. The familiar becomes strange and disturbing. Geleynse’s works have the unsettling effect of the uncanny. The domestic is made “unhomely" and vulnerable – houses are made of glass.  

The tension between what we assume ta public and private, interior and exterior, is constantly played out in this exhibition. Geleynse’s primary concern is with the projection of “self” and identity. His artworks are an assertion of the senses, the unconscious and the irrational, particularly male desire and anxiety. A recurring masked man – the artist’s alter-ego - acts out the dialectic of alienation and identification, the ideal self-battling with the reflected self. Intimacy is confronted through this masquerade – a masked figure holds his genitals in a warehouse full of personal memorabilia. The presence of objects charged with memory in this exhibition, serves no nostalgic or cathartic purpose, but rather, problematizes our understanding of the past. Afterall, the “man trying to explain pictures” to an audience of empty frame participants in an endless loop of distorting projections. Geleynse acknowledges that identity is a series of controlled memories, thus memory is something to fear as well as reckon with.  

-   Exhibition text written by Helga Pakasaar 

Curated by Richard Gordon, Assistant Curator, Illingworth Kerr Gallery.