The Crystal Gaze

In The Crystal Gaze three women occupy the art deco rooms of Eltham Palace in London. “…What they articulate is the fact of their own bodies-become-images, exquisitely fragmented and reflected in the metaphor of our and their crystal gazes. As the opening bars of Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is? are played and they break into tragic-comic song the message is both high-camp relief and the damnation of a fascination with the screen. What they embody is something like a distillation of Cinema: neither history nor biography, but quite simply the unbearable seduction of an image that we cannot enter but from which we can neither escape.” Ian White.