For the past ten years, the film and video work of Deirdre Logue has explored self-representation, the passage of time, and the nature of everyday anxieties. This exhibition brings together Logue's key works from this period to highlight the artist's ongoing explorations into the threshold and its physical, emotional and psychological ramifications.
Operating in a closed system of self-reflexive gestures, Logue's work evokes the worry, frustration and shame that structure our movement through the world. Climbing between mattress and box spring, flooding one's mouth with milk, counting confetti endlessly—these are not motions that register clearly on the radar of everyday action. Their resonance, however—a sense of urgency and confusion, a familiar weight on the chest—is uncanny.
The artist's use of these gestures speaks to her concern with accounting for the self, and reconciling that self with the exterior world. Translating the sum of our symptoms, neuroses and tics into something that can be personally understood is a daunting prospect; how, then, to organize that self for consumption by others?
To this end, Logue turns to non-verbal action as a corrective to the gap between the affective force of experience and the capacity of language to convey that experience. The humble feats, modest accomplishments and disconcerting gestures Logue presents to the camera are offered as an alternate lexicon of interiority, a more effective means to grapple with the self. While Logue herself is centralized in these works, the greater social and cultural significance of the disparities she points to—between inside and outside, language and touch, consciousness and action—belies any simple narcissism on the artist's part. Instead, we witness her concern not only with an individual sense of dislocation, but also with the broader anxieties that temper contemporary existence.
