Natalie Majaba Waldburger

Peepwhole

Peep-whole derived out of a group exhibition entitled “wHole”. I really struggled with the title of the show.  Wanting to incorporate fully the pun implicit in the word -- in “whole” is its own antithesis “hole” – I tried to imagine objects that incorporated this duality.  I wanted to find this place in the domain of the home.  Having just moved to an unfamiliar city I was feeling somewhat fragmented and un-whole I looked around my temporary dwellings and immediately fixated on the peephole in the front door.  The front door is the boundary between me the world.  The front door takes on the role of a barrier to that world.  Through this hole one can see a “whole”.  It contains a fish-eye lens with a range of almost 180 degrees. 

In the exhibit three peepholes were installed in the gallery walls between rooms so that the whole exhibition could be viewed through holes.  One would be in one room while viewing another and therefore experiencing the whole or ‘wHole’ exhibit simultaneously.  The front lens of the peephole is simulated to look like an eye, complete with eyelashes, and lids.  A viewer on the other side of the gallery wall would witness the act of someone looking at this eye.  One would see the gaze of another another who could not return her gaze. 

The peepholes become Other through their transformation into eyes.  They are familiar yet strange and out of context.  They cross the boundary from observation to  voyeurism.  In the same process they create Otherness, the relationship of two people looking at the same piece mediated through the peephole.  Fashioning an eye out of a peephole, while humanizing it to a certain degree, renders it unfamiliar.  Our understanding of them is in their function as distancing mechanisms.  They are devices that keeps the outside world within sight but, yet, distant.  We are aware of them as objects with this singular purpose.  Imbuing the peephole with human characteristics does not make it more familiar.  It becomes uncomfortable as an object because of what we recognise.  The eye is unnerving because it can see, yet it is a voyeuristic view and we are made conscious of ourselves as the subjects of an unreciprocated gaze.  Our engagement with the eye is the same as our engagement with the person enclosed within their homes.  We are sized up, analysed, and questioned.  The intimacy which it promises in its familiarity is empty, removed from our experience by its juxtaposition of recognisable elements.