Helena Gouveia Monteiro
ends meet

Helena Gouveia Monteiro is a Portuguese artist based in Dublin whose practice spans film, photography, installation, and publications. In her image making, she explores both technical and theoretical approaches, referencing the history of experimental cinema and media archaeology; she is more interested in the physical properties of film than in the medium’s ‘representational’ capacities. Her work examines how images produced by apparatuses and processes, whether lens-based or otherwise, shape our visual culture.

The exhibition ends meet brings a newly made, commissioned film of the same title together with a set of five photographs titled Equivalents (2015). Both depict cloud formations in an almost abstract manner, and cite the work of artists Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), known for her enduring interest in natural forms, and Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), who initiated a photographic series of his own titled Equivalents in the early 1920s. Monteiro follows their ideas of detaching subject matter from literal interpretation, but by introducing a private and fragile emotional sphere, she contradicts the modernist myth of artistic genius that Stieglitz, in particular, aspired to epitomise.

Monteiro began ends meet with two photographs she shot with a digital camera. She then exposed strips of film to the light of a computer screen and/or video projector and ‘printed’ small portions (around 47 pixels) of the original photographs onto each of their frames. By transferring the digital photographs onto film strips through a darkroom process allowing for direct contact between the digital source and the analogue receptacle, she preserved and brought forth the unique characteristics of both elements.

ends meet features a long succession of textured, flickering, ‘chemical-looking’ imagery that blends a wide spectrum of solid colours with ethereal views of cloudy skies in black and white. The voice-over is composed of excerpts from intimate letters that O’Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged between 1916 and 1929. In a flat monotone, the narrator reads from their lyrical descriptions of the weather, which often expand outward from reflections on atmospheric conditions to ruminations on their relationship and their shared adventures in fabricating meaning through images. Each segment begins with the letter’s location and date as a kind of geographical and temporal marker.

Some sections of ends meet include footage captured by Monteiro while undertaking a residency at Sirius Arts Centre, housed in a building facing Cork Harbour and an entry point to the Atlantic Ocean. At one moment a freighter slowly passes by, framed by a window; at others, the ethereal cloudy skies typical of Irish meteorological conditions are enhanced by the expansive water reflections that characterise the site. The letters’ occasional mentions of locales in the United States merge these different realities under one airspace, dissolving any specific sense of place and contributing to an overall dreamlike ambience.

ends meet is a poetic undertaking that is both meditative and searching. The title suggests the simultaneous connection and distance between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, both concrete – they lived apart from each other – and psychological. More metaphorically, it also evokes the association – historical, intellectual and material – between analogue and digital imagery. The tradition of centring attention upward alludes to spirituality, while Monteiro’s scrutiny of how we interpret visual information points to questions of perception and memory, as well as how our relationship with the world is mediated by matter.