Writing
There’s Not Much Time, from North by Northwest, 93 X 156, 2009
Eve and Thornhill meet once again after she has shot him with blanks, faking his death. They are brought together by “The Professor”, the head U.S. Intelligence Agent, who is responsible for endangering Eve and Thornhill’s lives, using them as pawns to uncover information in his investigation of Vandamm as a spy. The Professor’s group has created a fictitious agent named “George Kaplan” in hopes of misleading Vandamm. Immediately before the fake shooting, Thornhill learned that the man he was mistaken for never existed, and that the woman he though sent him to his death was actually his ally.
Or rather, two figures face each other in front of a background of vibrating vertical tension. A male figure stands mesmerized, if slightly frightened. A female figure is depicted facing away from the viewer, arms clasped behind her back, stiff and tentative. Both are alarmed, caught off guard, and interacting through a field of rigidity and static, of heavy hesitation.
The scene is from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 filmic masterpiece North by Northwest. Bell’s paintings illuminate great moments of 20th century cinema, selected with an eye towards a classical sensibility, framed with geometric symmetry. Departing from Hitchcock, she has spotlighted films – from Fellini spectacles to little-known Noir gems – that have both strong aesthetic languages and nuanced psychological threads guiding the narrative. She then shrewdly inverts the paradigm, seizing upon this psychology, utilizing it an apparatus of refining, of sharpening. Bell transforms these distinct, disparate –though all celebrated – achievements of cinematography, distilling film stills into a shared, formalistic, intentionally limited, visual language in which the guiding psychology is both instrument and corpus. While turning the aesthetic identity of her filmic source on its head, Bell’s reductive process reveals the fundamental core of the film’s cognitive and emotional text.
Bell’s work probes the conscious and subconscious motivations within body language through a minimalist lens. The specifics of human identity become superfluous, and are sublimated into a fragmented puzzle in which the barriers between humans and their experiences are lifted, erased. These tableaus are visual and cognitive puzzles, Rorschach tests of emotional perception. Each canvas is a plane of fluid, fluctuating cognizance. Bell’s conceptually rigorous formalism sets forth a framework in which nothing is taken for granted, every depicted detail is both agent and substance: being itself is a subject of interrogation.
In this formalist structure, the human body is boiled down to geometry, the bare components of gesture. And encoded within gesture, motivation is revealed, slyly, teasingly. Bell allows us an entry point into each filmic moment, just enough, a point of rupture which begets great interpretative and imaginative leeway. This is only fitting considering the commonalities within her subject matter – many of the films Bell paints reference mistaken identity – including Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! and Orson Welles’s The Stranger. Other films Bell depicts explore the impermanence of beauty, and the fleeting nature of innocence: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, Jean Renoir’s The River, and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2. Where these films converge is in their sense of mystery, in the mood cultivated through the unspoken. Bell’s work faithfully probes this unspoken territory. Accordingly, it is seemingly ironic that Bell has named each of her paintings with a phrase taken from the nearest uttered dialogue in the scene chosen. This is a playful, if slightly mischievous, move on Bell’s part: the crux of meaning is retained in posture and gesture, not in the artifice of articulation.
Also characterizing all of the films Bell paints is a dreamlike, dramatic, almost romantic visual palette. It must be said that, within the tension, Bell’s compositions have a similar quality. Her colors are deceptive, the boldness of the hues she employs to capture the subversive is so bright they spring off the canvas, creating ocular vibration, near optical illusion. This brightness only serves to highlight the darkness at play in human deception, the physicalization of deviousness. The true intent behind the language reveals itself within the carriage of the body. Bell’s abstraction makes this perfectly clear. And in the absence of nonessential detail, the viewer is confronted with his or her own assumptions and responses. The roots of “learned behavior” are challenged by the linguistics of embodied language. In Bell’s work, with the internal state externalized, the etymology of physical language emerges as ripe for interrogation.
Bell’s definition of “nonessential detail” is rather broad and encompassing. Without facial specificity, the depicted figures are rendered without personal, identifying attributes. Interestingly, this opens a liminal space for intensely personal examination on the part of the viewer. Unencumbered by detail, the viewer is invited to freely interpret the relationships between the depicted figures, and interject themselves into the psychological dynamic: Who is actor? Who is acted upon? This fluid interchange fundamentally extends to the larger composition: What is background? What is foreground? Certainly they are not fixed on the visual or conceptual plane. They are always framed in tension, always in dialogue, always shifting.
Armed with a formalist’s vocabulary, a painfully bright palette, and a keen eye for the nuances of gesture, Dana Bell has delved into cinema’s rich history and emerged with a complex study of physicalized language, and thus a portal into human behavior itself. She highlights the darker, more ominous corners of consciousness with a vigorous sense of spacial play. Bell transforms filmic narrative, refining it into a semiotic language that reveals the subtle manipulations and extraordinary artifice within human expression. And if the truth behind our existential struggle is located in body, not in the remove produced by plodding articulation, how is the viewer – and Bell herself – implicated through our own physicality? Dana Bell begs that we ask these questions ourselves. As the glow of her paintings imposes itself on us, how can we not filter our own personage through Bell’s visual cosmology?