WITH HER EYES

In the works by Cologne’s media artist Melanie Wiora (born 1969), the Renaissance ideal of the image as a window to the world has been turned on its head. Not the world out there but rather an interior world is at the heart.

The gazes of the lightened faces in the series Outside Is in Me are fixed on an undefined OFF. The digitally edited photographs spray the moment of a inwardly looking inventory. The eyes, in which the finest reflections of light refract, do not allow the gaze to penetrate outward; instead the reflected pupils seem to throw the gaze back inside.

It is no coincidence that Wiora’s works recall Salvador Dalí’s impressive dream sequence in the 1945 Hitchcock classic Spellbound. Wiora’s works give us a fascinating window into the inner perspectives of those portrayed – a perspective that corresponds to no kind of physical reality. The houses and parks in the backgrounds of various big cities arouse the impression that they belong to an unreal world. The buildings appears as though in motion and lie beyond any spatial relation to the pictured faces. The background seems to exist outside of time. Idleness and motion collapse into one. What is particular to these works is that they capture more condition than situation.

In the photographic series Eyescapes, the all-encompassing eye is the agent between outside and inside. Not only the exterior world, which can be gleaned in the strong warping, is reflected in the photographer’s convex pupil. The emphasis on the seeing eye in these works casts its gaze backward – like in the series Outside Is in Me. This time it is the viewer himself who becomes aware of his own position as observer. Thus these works also convey not only the visible but also an interior condition. Wiora understands how to uniquely implement Surrealism’s concept, in which the eye represents the shortest path to the soul.

David Gärtner