I'M WARY
I’m Wary is a collaboration between Mary Maclean and Sally Morfill exploring the activity of viewing through installation and video. It takes the familiar viewing space of the gallery collection and works with a series of perceptual shifts which collapse the habits of looking.

The idea of viewing is looked at through the choices at play in the structuring of displayed elements in the public gallery collection or stately home environment. These interiors are visually complex and suggest a layering of artifacts which appear to overlap in a curious lack of hierarchy; easy location of the object of the institution is suspended.

A section of a large painting, a landscape with a path leading to faraway horizons, is caught in the architecture of its location, seamlessly tracking both the presence of frame, wall and architrave and the more extended illusion of space of the picture.

Continuous movement through space is imposed on the viewer in negotiating a relation to the work and its placement within the showing space at Five Years. The borders between the physical nature of the gallery space and the representation of the image cohere in overlapping territories: movement between the two unfolds itself continually, referencing both the ‘now’ of the act of looking and the memory of prior encounters with other spaces of viewing.

The collaboration invites gaps between the efforts of discussion and measurement; I’m Wary folds slippage and failure into its coordinates.