Tilda: Fear, Fury and Frustration

Abstract

The initial brief for this work was to explore narrative and how art direction in the studio can affect the outcome of the image. The actor, Tilda, was given a range of emotions to project towards the camera (though not directly at the lens) and an image was taken approximately every five seconds. What is not revealed, and ultimately has no bearing on the piece, is that the subject is an actor and the emotions being asked of her are contrived and stage-managed. Rather than reinforcing the intended narrative, the title and the sequence of images obfuscates our reading in an attempt to highlight the ambiguity inherent in any work of art.

The presentation and the deliberate resistance to explanation draw heavily on the work of Ed Ruscha and Martha Rosler, who provide similar examples ambivalent and equivocal in their manifestation. Notably, Ruscha’s Every Building on Sunset Strip and Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems demonstrate how image and text can serve to deter assumptions and emotional responses. The flat, minimal and literal nature of their presentation delimits our explication of the subject matter. Rosler’s work attests to a strong social dimension that works to reinstate ethical intention through an ambivalence of form.