Jane and Louise Wilson

Jane and Louise Wilson, Normapaths (installation view), 1995

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Jane and Louise Wilson (b. 1967, Britain) were represented at TRACE by a video installation entitled Normapaths (1995). The work consisted of a double projection displayed with one of the sets used in the original film. It was installed in a building that is not dissimilar to the brewery in which their spatial and psychological scenarios were originally conceived. 

The Wilsons’ visions of this fictional setting were sometimes congruent, at other times slightly divergent. The effect of the latter was of simulated double vision: not two separate views, but rather a sense of two eyes temporarily out of alignment as a result of intoxication. This doubling was structurally reinforced by the inclusion of the set within the space as an index of its production.

The different levels and eerie volumes of the brewery became a dreamscape. A duet performed on a trampoline was slowed down to evoke dreamy images of flight, then re-entered real time at the peak of the twins’ ascent. The figures finally drifted slowly back down as if exhausted from their explosive climax. The atmosphere of the sequence is reminiscent of 1960s TV series like The Avengers or The Prisoner, both of which had strong elements of parody. Indeed the choreographed bouncing was a further resonance with The Prisoner’s famous bouncing ball, which routinely retrieved Patrick McGoohan on the verge of escape from his Kafkaesque prison.

The set included in the installation reproduced a rather tacky domestic room that was partly destroyed when the women crashed through the walls during the making of the film. ‘Normal’ women do not, as we all know, leap through walls or engage in aerial fights. Nor do they walk through fire, or draw glowing orbs from their mouths. We have labels for this kind of aberrant behaviour, such as ‘hysterical’ or ‘pathological’. The Normapaths subverted this language of femininity and the assumptions that lie behind it.

Jane and Louise Wilson at Liverpool Biennial 1999

Normapaths, 1995
16mm Film (2 U-matic, 3 mins 40 secs, loop)
Courtesy of Lisson gallery, London