Catalogue Introduction to "A Rainbow in Curved Air"
By Rowan Smith
Life is a dream that keeps me from sleeping.
Daniella Mooney’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, derives its title from the Terry Riley album of 1969. Riley was a pioneer in Minimal, Classical and Ambient music, but his piquantly worded title brings about a schism between language and perception- what the eye sees, and how the brain interprets it. After all a rainbow appears curved, as Mooney later describes this curvature is due to the spherical shape of water particles floating in the atmosphere, but couldn’t a rainbow also be straight and the air curved? When the sun sets the horizon line appears straight, but we know that the earth is in fact curved. Could the inverse not be true for a rainbow? Since we cannot grab hold of a rainbow to see if it is truly curved or straight, we must rely on scientific hypothesis, alchemical mythology and the naked eye.
Not only is Riley’s album title of significance to Mooney’s production, but the composition itself (of the same title) bares delicately similar concerns. Mark Prendergast has described it as ‘[a] recording of ‘spatially separated mirror images’[1]. A mirrored image is unattainable, it is mere reflection or illusion, it is ‘reality’ inverted. Jorge Louis Borges has constantly referred to the distrust of the mirror in his writing:
I, who felt the horrors of mirrors
Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal
Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable,
An impossible space of reflections,
But of gazing even on water that mimics
The other blue in its depth of sky,
That at times gleams back the illusory flight
Of the inverted bird, or that ripples…[2]
The first mirrors are believed to be dark, still pools of liquid. Mooney thus takes the mirror back to its very beginning in her work. A recorded sky, ‘the other blue’, is reflected and inverted. The unattainable blue of the sky is reflected into the unattainable space within a mirror, a perceptual double entendre. The mirror image appears again in another work where two prisms reflect each other, in this instance however the reflection doesn’t exist in the impenetrable surface of a mirror but in formally inverted objects, teasing the perception of the viewer.
My grandmother once related to me an old Afrikaans saying- ‘Jy jaag spoke’ or ‘You’re chasing ghosts.’ While I forget the exact context of this encounter, the intent is of import- to pursue something that is not only intangible but whose very existent is in question, or at the very least mythical. This concept is not indifferent to the works in Mooney’s exhibition. Can one trade an eyelash for a wish? Can one bring the elusive encounter of an eclipse into a manageable experience? Can one hold a rainbow in wood? Like the persistence of vision or afterimage from staring into the sun, these are the perceptual ghosts Mooney pursues in her work.
[1] Prendergast, M.2000. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to trance- the evolution of sound in the electronic age. London: Bloomsbury
[2] From Dreamtigers, translated by Harold Morland.