Over the past several years Rebecca Pilcher has been exploring the manifold implications of the Town Belt, surrounding Wellington as both a highly constructed, controlled, and manipulated area, and a pastoral, green, and meditative space ripe for creative and discursive play. In the current installation, Pilcher has reconfigured some portions of a timber geodesic dome that she exhibited in two radically different settings in 2015, once in a public park and once in a gallery space. In the Engine Room, the dome is deconstructed, splayed apart and becomes simultaneously a fractal-like relief and a viewing station, an area in which Pilcher’s videos which appear to have a dreamlike, eccentric quality of their own are, in effect, transmitted through yet another mediating structure, accenting the embodied quality of our positioning as spectators. This provides an intriguing counterpoint to the almost ethereal quality of the footage, figures walking in a reverie, costumed with numerous colourful accessories, offering up an imaginative amalgam recalling both the experimental cinema of Maya Deren and SciFi otherworldliness. By interrupting such footage with * * inter-titles drawn from mindfulness texts, and adding a soundtrack of ambient music, Pilcher gives us a generous glimpse into a conjured space that’s ultimately just as imaginary, constructed, and seemingly elusive as the town belt itself.
Martin Patrick
Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue, Is it the Beginning of a New Age. July 2016.
http://theengineroom.org.nz/projects/is-it-the-beginning-of-a-new-age