Drifting Screens: Tom Blake’s Visual Notations

By Sarah Robayo Sheridan

index / silt is a push-pull of meaning. To index is to fix, to point out, to sort, to organize, to categorize into meaning. The index signifies, it indicates, it declares. The pointing of the index finger is a milestone in early child development, a primal communicative signal. When a child points she directs the gaze of her parent to an object of interest and she comes into a language community through this social gesture. Tom Blake’s indexing is an offering, a distillation of subtle events drawn out of the close and careful observation of his surround. These visual notations range from the near to the faraway. From oranges catching light as they are being rinsed, to the swarming of bees in a visual staccato across a blue sky. Each observance is presented as a twin set of galaxies, unfolding simultaneously but presenting certain very slight irregularities. Two slices of the same raw visual data but with a differential breathing cadence, an evident arrythmia, a slight convulsion or tremor that is the result of frame rate drift. These miniscule disruptions in otherwise parallel lines alert us to pay close attention.

Presented on decommissioned smart phones repurposed as gallery displays, these diptychs are diminutive in scale. They enter the space with a pre-existing history of touch, having journeyed closely alongside a human, always within quick reach, carried everywhere. As miniscule suitcases of information, they perform as a second set of eyes and ears, an index of fast moving data clouds at the ready. The perfect little tools of observational cinema, they witness, they record, they claim agency, they direct vision. And, as observable in any crowd, they magnetize attention. So, it is no small feat to re-assign smart phones in such a way that we may forget their original trappings. Released from the charge of their regular duties, slowed into a quieter tempo, these screens become windows onto fixed scenes of a meditative quality, looping in an infinite course of repetition.

Not unlike the manicule’s function in medieval texts, these videos say, “Look, see here.” They are pleasing images, engrossing, simple yet enigmatic. Of the oranges under water, I wonder, what is the context beyond the frame? Are the oranges to be found in a sink, a colander, a bucket? Were they left out in the rain or are they being immersed for some particular recipe? And what of the hand motions captured in the reflection of a window, floating amidst a forest of leaves? What are these hands saying, what conversation, or lesson, or story are they emphasizing? All these images lead to auditory and sensory associations. The dancing laundry recalls the sound of wind chimes, the kitchen scene invokes the smell of ceramic tiles, the pace of a quiet morning. The way the accidental projection lands through a window onto a wall mirrors distinct moments observed in my own domestic interior.

To index, is to suspend something within a container. And this is where the silt comes in. The silt is the unclassifiable. Neither sand nor clay, it defies capture, it eludes the container. It may temporarily form into sediment and compound meaning, but it never completely calcifies. It is a million messy traces trying to be held by an inept vessel, like language itself. This is intrinsic paradox at the heart of the project that Tom Blake names index / silt.

Sarah Robayo Sheridan is Assistant Professor, Visual Art at the University of Toronto. She has previously served as director of exhibitions and publications at Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art and as curator of exhibitions at The Power Plant. Her work in the field includes affiliations with Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, the Toronto International Film Festival, the journal Public, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Long Now Foundation, San Francisco and Steven Leiber Basement/Rite Editions. Her writing has appeared in arts magazines, anthologies and artists' monographs, including Paul Sietsema’s Seven Films by Mousse Publishing.