The concept behind this exhibition locates it within the latter tradition of reading or viewing. The art on display here is explicitly given a context—is seen as the artists' work during their month at the Whitechapel. We are not only invited to look at the 'work done' (or the witness to such) as the end or suspension of process, but are also reminded that the work has been done in the gallery, as yet another inscription of 'context'. So how does the gallery's gift of this frame affect our reading?
Immediately, one thing is obvious. Some of the work itself tells of its making. Materially vestigal, Monica Ross's consignment of objects and images speaks (in its formal arrangement) of time spent exploring the gallery's interior spaces. Her pieces (under the collective title 'Passages') nose out the gallery's forgotten and overlooked angles and aspects, as so many sites for the artist's narrative fragments. Our reading of these works' outward references engages the spectator's own behind-the-scenes knowledge: we know that they were conceived or pursued in the space (or place) and so had the chance to be site-specific. 'The Alley of Angels' for instance, appears to allude to the neighbourhood's own Angel Alley—running alongside the gallery, and as proximate literally as it is verbally.
This manner of 'passing outside' works metaphorically (signs passing for other signs—those of high art passing for those of street life) and deals with a concept of passage. It is the mode of the rest of this artist's work here. Passage is further explored as the movement of people—particularly those who have come to the area around the Whitechapel, those exiles or strangers to England who live (or have lived) in Angel Alley. ('L'etre ange'—angel being—is acoustically close to 'etranger' or 'stranger'.) From a different perspective, the stranger is also the stranger to strangers. This 'person in passing' is caught, in the artist's work, on the video monitor: ascending the gallery's staircase, turning the corner; and it is also us, and us too bathed in (or stained by) the red light of freedom or violence… Of all these diversely embodied and charged transformations, this is the one that unsettles the most—if, along with the others, productively so.
Mary Anne Francis from the exhibition guide 1993
passage
passage Whitechapel Art Gallery, Summer Residencies, London. 1993
installation: stained and engraved glass, video monitor and camera, ambient light, video installation