See Through Lines

In ‘See Through Lines’ by Stansfield and Hooykaas , the viewer’s gaze glides along a Dutch landscape: starting with the sky, and then descending from an electricity pylon towards a canal. Then the image travels up again, along the other bank towards the sky.
In this work, Stansfield and Hooykaas bring about a connection between the horizontal lines of the landscape (the horizon, the high-water mark, the lines of a quay) and the grid of lines of the black-and-white video image. A second sequence of images shows a recording of the original recording in which the lines of the monitor can be seen more and more prominently. ‘See Through Lines plays with the line as a boundary’: a natural partition or a man-made fence in space. Does a boundary mark the beginning of something or rather the end: or a bit of both? ‘When one goes to look for a boundary it is so often like Zen – nothing there, you pass over it – it is an invisible line.’ The image also shows another, clearly visible, boundary – that between the representation and the perception of reality. The directness of the image is relativised by means of distance and repetition. At a given moment the viewer’s perception becomes literally limited, when the lines on the monitor screen come more clearly into view. Then it is no longer the landscape that draws the attention, but rather, the lines on the screen. The viewer is forced to do what the title suggests: to see through lines.