The Power Plant

Writer, art critic, and curator James Oscar, in examining Shelagh Keeley’s film Jardim do Ultramar / The Colonial Garden, Lisbon, Portugal, will point to how the work disrupts colonial ways of seeing and framing through her lingering mode of perception. Keeley’s moving images operate through what he refers to as a “lingering” that gives the spectator space to unpack colonial forms of atmospheres, temporality, and image control amongst the deliberately paced images presented in her exhibition. Oscar will point to Keeley’s forms of “haunted immersion” that launch the viewer into a decelerated notion of seeing, not just “inside time,” but also, quite literally, from inside the image itself. His response to Keeley’s work is shaped not only by his work as a critic and curator, but by a shared generational kinship with Keeley herself.

Both emerged from the analog sensibilities of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—a period marked by the aesthetics of slow cinema and the multi-sensory temporal architectures of NY nightclubs like the Limelight, or the experimental film movements of the era—their mutual visions having been formed in recesses of the analog grain, with its sense of friction and its ensuing complex pacts between what is visible and “invisible.”

Oscar will reflect and discuss with Keeley how this lineage of seeing continues to inform Keeley’s visual language. Beyond spectacle, Keeley’s work marks this “past” form of seeing, invoking quiet and unhurried ways of looking beyond the hyper-definition of the digital present. Oscar will theorize this approach to the slow image in Keeley’s work and in the inheritance of slow cinema (Tarkovsky, Ming-liang, etc.) from which she emerges.