Painting
Sian Costello
Dress Rehearsals for the Apparition of Saint Veronica
Dress Rehearsals is a performative life drawing session, in which a traditional life drawing set-up is moderated by the presence of the camera lens, transforming the changing-screen from an act of concealment to the viewfinder of a monumental camera obscura. The camera obscura, literally a dark box, when removed from the perfunctory role of capturing images, becomes a purely performative instrument of seeing. As simple as can be, the camera is without focusing tools, the distance between the surface of the model’s skin and the camera lens will determine levels of sharpness or blur. That same visceral reality of what could otherwise be yet another cerebral photographic concept, focus; that rawness manifests itself upon the tracing paper screen, an image not so much captured as visiting.
Dress Rehearsals is the first in the series of public events intended to develop the idea of drawing as a temporal patina and performance as a presence in spite of the camera lens.