Legions
in the Ceiling
published in UN No.2, Melbourne, 2004
Geoff Robinson is deaf in one ear. This makes him a more
interesting installation artist than those with balanced
hearing. To the impaired, sight and sound are treated less
as sensory comfort and more as unqualified phenomenae. Images,
echoes, forms, resonances, shapes, harmonics, shadows, drones,
glare - all are reworked as suspect material in Geoff's
installations. His work is seeded with doubt and apprehension.
His materials are less about fragility and more their unsettling
tactility. Water is about to pour over an edge; clouds rise
like steam; light shafts stun the eye; trees grow unpredictably;
indistinct rumbles disorient perspective.
In LEGIONS IN THE CEILING at Bus, all sound and vision are
located in the roof: the ceiling is peeled back to revel
strange shadows and bursts of light. Lo-fi rumbles suggest
chairs being dragged across the crawlspace above. Someone’s
doing something not-nice. This is Geoff doing cinema without
being photo-precious about it. This ain’t sepia turn-of-the-century
poetic crud with a few dried apples in Joseph Cornell boxes:
this is carney spooksville abstracted. It’s pop without
Pop Culture 101; it’s the fetid inversion of materials
in order to bypass references. (References are for dorks.)
Don’t open the fridge. Don’t go down the basement.
Don’t go up the attic. LEGIONS IN THE CEILING points
at you: it saw what you did and it knows who you are. Geoff
is with the people who live under the stairs. They are legion.
He’s making noise with them. He’s deaf in one
ear but he hears cinema better than you.
