Troy Ruffels

Faultlines
12 June to 7 July 2009

Inhabiting two bodies at the same time

Back in the early 1970s, a phenomenon that came to be known as Detroit Windscreen Syndrome briefly occupied the attention of the American public. Someone had called a radio talkback show to say that his car windscreen had, apparently overnight, been scoured by thousands of tiny pockmarks. Other listeners responded excitedly that they had noticed the same thing. What was pitting the windscreens of Detroit? Caustic emissions? Aliens? After a flurry of anxious speculation a lone voice of sanity pointed out that, over time, all car windscreens became pitted, it was just that people didn’t usually notice because they were looking through them, not at them.

Windscreen technology has no doubt improved since, but the story is pertinent for two reasons. First, it shows that our perception of the world is shaped by much more than just an objective reality. We see selectively, and what we choose to notice (and, for that matter, what we choose not to) is a result of learning, social conditioning and ingrained habit. Second, because so much of what we do see these days comes to us at one remove, screened through glass or some other translucent membrane, we are scarcely aware of the refractions, reflections and distortions colouring our view.
           
Sitting inside, warm and dry, as rain beats against the windows, or speeding down the highway serenely unperturbed by any rush of air, we fail to notice how much our senses have been isolated. Not that we object to being cosseted, cocooned and comforted, of course, but the downside is that we see a lot without actually experiencing very much at all.
           
It is somewhere into this ever-widening gap between experiencing and merely witnessing that Troy Ruffles’s evocative images insinuate themselves. By seizing on fleeting moments that are, on the face of it, utterly banal, then freezing them in time, he manages to invest them with a melancholy poetry. In emphasising how rather than what we see, Troy brings us face to face with our own reflections. As Roland Barthes once wrote about the effects of the cinema, these works encourage us to ‘be fascinated twice over, by the image and by its surroundings – as if [we] had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it ...’

It can be tempting, when looking at Troy’s works, to recall those grainy, indistinct photographs taken by spiritualists in the nineteenth century that supposedly revealed apparitions invisible to the naked eye. It is not a tree we are looking at, but the spectral traces it leaves behind as it passes, which only the camera’s lens is capable of revealing.

Troy’s method is deceptively simple, relying largely upon chance. The ostensible subject, typically a roadside tree, has been glimpsed briefly through the car windscreen as he drives to and from work between Devonport and Launceston. He photographs it on the wing, without premeditation, as unselfconsciously as possible, never taking his eye off the road, so that it blurrs into the drizzle of rain on the glass or the glare of oncoming headlights, or slews off towards the edge of the frame behind the shadow of the rear-view mirror or the curve of a door-frame.

Yet, while contingency plays its part, this is far from being simply a random process. Troy had been travelling this particular stretch of rural highway for over a year before he began photographing it, and another year passed before he was able to sit down and select the images he wanted to work with from all those he had amassed. So these are not just any trees. Only when the journey had been completed so often that it was becoming thoroughly routine did he feel ready to experience it afresh.

Faultlines, therefore, is not so much about making new discoveries or setting out on new paths, but instead the potentially far more interesting process of transforming over-familiar things by casting them in an entirely new light. It is also a multi-faceted journal of changing atmospheric conditions and the passing of hours, days and seasons. It is an exercise in extracting wonder from the everyday, in redefining the relationship between what is seen and who is seeing. It is about attachment, about straying and returning home and the intervals that mark the journey. We might compare it to Odysseus’s long trek home, except that this one is repeated again and again: the Odyssey meets Groundhog Day.

In the studio, while engrossed in the exacting task of selecting, framing and printing, Troy says he listens to the violin concertos of Philip Glass, or Peter Sculthorpe’s Quamby Bluff or Requiem, playing these already subtly repetitive pieces again and again until they take on a hypnotic quality, allowing him to dive beneath their surface variations and fully inhabit their metaphorical spaces. It is one of the ways in which he tries, as Barthes so succinctly puts it, to take on two bodies at the same time.

And, in order that we might do the same as we stand contemplating the outcomes, he prints onto aluminium, whose shiny, reflective surface draws the conditions of our viewing (along with our own mirror-images) into the picture. To underline the point even further, he has shown some of these works outdoors, where they accumulated fallen leaves, layers of dust and beads of moisture, further dissolving the distinctions between foreground and background, subject and object, movement and interval, signifier and signified.

Troy has said that he likes ‘the grit and texture of the landscape... Wherever possible I dwell outside. The worse the weather is, the better. Of course, I like nice days, but there is nothing like the wind, or the impact of rain on your skin, or swimming in icy water, to make you breathe.’

The works in this exhibition urge us to breathe: to get out of the car, out of the house, and to re-aquaint ourselves with the grit and texture of things.            

Peter Timms, May 2009.