As I mentioned before, I consider Nebulosus’s newest installation to be her strongest so far:

I’m Sorry, Dad is probably the most stripped down and least self-consciously “arty” work I’ve seen by the artist. Perched up in the air like some sort of very sad, very strange tree house, the work explores the artist’s relationship (or perhaps non-relationship) with her RL father.

Almost immediately upon teleporting to the space, the viewer encounters a link to the artist’s blog. The entry tells the story of a recent visit she took to see her father; what makes the story remarkable and heartbreaking is its utter ordinariness. She’s not relaying a narrative about some sort of extraordinary child abuse or neglect, nor does she speak of her father in any way that could even remotely be described as an attack. She just methodically, almost matter-of-factly, opens a window to a situation that has just plodded along for years. In the story she tells, not much more than a dull ache remains of a relationship that’s barely there at all.

The strange little details – intimacies, in many ways – that the artist shares with us really make the whole thing work. This is the kind of story so familiar, the kind of thing that gets repeated over and over on TV dramas and short stories and that sort of thing, that the artist could easily lose her viewer in a wave of generalities. We all know what that kind of relationship is like – there’s no one alive who hasn’t experienced something close to what the artist describes. But she personalizes it by tossing in little details (her cake decorating class, her roommate, the first car she drove) that make this piece specifically about her and her father, period.

In many ways, standing there in this lonely hall reading these words, I almost felt like the piece was complete just with that. But the viewer is then confronted with a choice to go left or right, down one hall or the other. One side will lead you to a collection of small objects that again refer to this specific relationship (this is a perfect example where the artist doesn’t completely show her hand and completely give everything away – I don’t really need to know exactly what that grizzly bear picture or latticework is about; I have enough information from the blog post to understand that these are related to her relationship with her father), culminating with one of two images at the end of the hall.

Because I looked at the artist’s Flickr stream, I know that one of the pictures is of her as a very young woman. Without that information, I think I would have pieced it together anyway; it’s a picture of a teenaged girl perhaps right at the exact moment when teenagehood conspires against young girls and everything changes for the worse. She seems awkward and uncomfortable with the gaze of the photographer, both quite normal for this age, but you know by looking at her that no matter how many times she’s been told this, it doesn’t make it easier. Down the opposite hall is a beaming little boy in a black and white class photograph that seems to date from the late 1950s or early 1960s. He is the picture of innocence, happily content and frozen in space. We have here a metaphor for their relationship, a juxtaposition of two images – one of knowing and the other of blissful ignorance. Or perhaps one awkward and uncomfortable and the other oblivious and totally unaware.

This is a remarkably strong piece full of the raw emotion I’ve come to associate with the artist’s work, but also infused with a subtly and delicacy that I haven’t seen before. It could have easily have become clichéd and overwrought, but the artist exercises incredible control and reserve. Instead of coming on strong and beating us over the head with every trick in the book, she lets the various elements in the installation breathe, work with each other, and do what they’re there to do.

Posted by Amy Freelunch on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 9:41 pm.