Raïssa Venebles - Tent Spread 2001

Currently showing at the Jersey City Museum is Raïssa Venables, who is presenting a series of haunting spaces, distorted, discoloured and lit to unbalance our pschological well being. Here's some more work of hers.

The title of the show is intimacies, clearly evoked in the domestic spaces, but is at the same time frustrated by the treatment. Just how intimate or even domestic is a lift? or a staircase? Even the bedroom (with its dual single beds) seems oppressive and distant rather than welcoming. The floatation tank in the centre of the room is bizarrely coffin shaped through the distortions in perspective. The distortions in the imagery close and open and twist photographic perspective, creating a world that due to the reference to a presumed scene, a discrepency results and gives us a hitchcockian Vertigo moment across the surface of the paper. Perhaps intimacies refers not to the qualities of the spaces alone but the act of viewing and intimating the changes in the spaces.