In her exhibition Rachel, Peter, Caitlin, John, 2010, for example, three 16mm studies of highly auratic subjects—a detailed view of a surviving copy of the Gutenberg Bible from the New York Public Library’s collection, a vacillating portrait of two Mark Rothko paintings housed in German museum collections, and the restive eye of a cat’s animal gaze—were punched through with varying intervals of abstract shapes. Having collected ticket-punching devices, Skaer superimposes each elementary portrait with intermittent frame-by-frame puncture sequences. The rudimentary syntax of shapes that unfolds between the three films—eliciting a desire to read an encoded proto-linguistic or rebus-like message—arises and appears to function only to then recede. Skaer’s act of negation is a direct enactment of medium as the puncture territorializes the objects portrayed and the scene of their projection, imprinting them both literally and figuratively—book, animal eye, and field of vision are hewn and riven by a stuttering language. The wayward representation of Skaer’s approach relies upon a spectator willing to engage in an act of translating between the images and their highly subjective negation. This act of reading the obstructed or obscured object-as-image happens again on a grander scale in Skaer’s, Leviathan Edge, 2009, where a sperm whale skeleton is hemmed in on all four sides by intermittent walls that serve as intervals for viewing the form in a deliberate unfolding of time. Engaging “a considerable effort of memory and imagination,” to borrow Gilles Deleuze’s description of a montage where there is no ultimate narrative imposition or resolve to make up for the gaps and lacunae that arise between images, Skaer’s filmic approach results in a “false continuity” imparted to reproducible objects and the natural world.(5) For her most recent films the puncture further emphasizes a focus on the interval of the cut, as the “in between” is made primary. 

Skaer’s new film, Margin of July, 2012, extends from a recent installation, Film for an Abandoned Projector, 2011, in which Skaer imagined the residual memory of a 35mm projector she happened upon in an abandoned cinema in Leeds, England. Each frame of the new film has been punched through with a more neutral horizon, leaving only the margins. Natural landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean unfold in fragments at the edge of the image—broken up skies, windswept forest canopy, harbor shots—and are brought close to geometric objects coming to rest, footage of mineral specimens, the dark interior of the Lyric House cinema in Leeds, a close-up view of harvesting fruit, or a shoreline view of tall ships passing at sea. Creating a space between telling and dwelling, Skaer’s shots imply narrative consequence—the so-called “action-image” of approaching a bank of windows to look out below, for example—before quickly giving way to an “affection-image” as Skaer narrows in to follow the twists and turns of a copper wire.(6) Such transitions become Skaer's mode of transition as sunlight finds an interior flash of light, or the coming to rest of a manufactured sphere recalls the ripeness of fruit. Throughout, however, correspondence through likeness, movement, and shape is attenuated by the stabilizing imposition of the puncture. 

The cut of montage—wedding footage together to create tension through immediacy, contrast, and flow—is abstracted to the margin of the image, residing at its outer edge. Movement is exiled and localized to the entering and exiting of the frame. The effort to read across the filmic gap that results requires what German filmmaker Alexander Kluge calls the act of viewers becoming “co-producers” in the articulation of images.(7) Skaer’s film is direct in this as it holds on to a gesture of removal (the cut or interval) that redoubles the expressiveness embedded in the image sequence. Two new sculptures extend this exploration of contact and interval as abstract cast shapes arise through successive generations—each new iteration receiving a new material to work from. Corner, Trap, Snare, 2012, for example, climbs the wall in three rungs from glass to bronze to wax in variations upon an abstract, ear-like shape made to stand on end, elongated and iterative like an apostrophe made vertical. Unfolding in three steps on the floor, Lie, Recline, List, 2012, proceeds from slate to wax to pewter in its synonymous departure from minimalist form, echoing the film’s nearby puncture. 

From the pairing of these interrelated sculptures to a new photographic series, Us to Them, 2012, the coupling of image to material and object to image surface resonates. Responding directly to Édouard Vuillard’s 1895 painting The Album, Skaer’s photographs extend the allover pattern and decoration of Vuillard’s interior scene into three dimensions as hardwood sculptures embedded with the patterns of semi-precious stones are held aloft before details of the painting. One of two gestures is staged and suspended in direct contact with Vuillard’s decision to leave a section of the canvas thin, bare, and opaque, while another returns the swirl and quiver of Vuillard’s insistent flatness and connective continuity from wall to figure to flower to couch to gaze that claimed the apt term “Intimist” in describing its attentiveness to surface. 

Rather than providing a commentary or supposition on Vuillard’s technique and his past as a scene painter in the theater or contrasting the painting’s departure from well-known breakthrough compositions like Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist and Interior of the work-table, both 1893, or elaborating upon the painting’s commission by Thadée and Misia Natanson, publishers of the avant-garde journal La Revue Blanche, and frequent hosts to Vuillard in the ornate yet intimate confines of their Parisian home, Skaer instead chooses to inhabit the moment, pulling forward a direct correspondence. The painting is made contiguous to the held gesture, object to surface, elongated present to suddenly manifest past become counterparts. Skaer’s objects interrupt the pictorial space without canceling the decisions of the painting, marking the surface as a site of perception, a place of looking. Us to Them moves away from interpreting the picture through citation, provenance, and context, and insists upon direct encounter, translation, and mimesis. Taking away the assured language of interpretation, Skaer stands on being relative, being alongside, being too close.(8) The gesture is held on to, the scene takes shape, the invitation is clear. We must inhabit the image.  

--Fionn Meade