Reynold Reynolds presents two new multiple-channel installations, Secret Life and Secret Machine, from his three-part cycle exploring the unperceivable conditions that frame life.

The cycle master plan consists of capturing, altering and storing the physical and psychic effects of space and time. In Secret Life, a woman is trapped in an apartment that experiences a collapse of time. While time is perceived as linear, the space is a clock machine that runs circular and repetitive. New durations come into the normal rhythm of life and the apartment suffers an explosion of activity. The inanimate reveals the animate, and what is perceived as still is in motion. The apartment has become alive and the space is no longer passive, but fertile. Without the certainty of time, the occupant of the apartment is unable to keep her location, and her mind neglects the organization of the experience, leaving her only with sensations. The thoughts escape from her and grow like plants out into the space around her, living, searching, overtaking her apartment, wild threatening her; then dieing and decaying like animals.

In Secret Machine, the same protagonist encounters an antagonist that is studying her, measuring her body and comparing her to units of space and time. Clocks rush and her movements are calculated on a grid; the eye is observed augmented through lenses; under water her breath is submitted to a resistance rate; needles are use to quantify her reactions and pain; and storing machines capture voice and motion, while diagrams and numeric notes trace every action. For the scientist, measurement replaces understanding. While human nature appears confined in the framework and efforts of rationality, the aspiration of trapping the soul provokes the antagonist to imagine the improvable. At the operation table she opens a small vivisection into the patient's ovary, and with a flower stamen she proceeds to pollinate her, giving to nectar and blood the same flow.

In Reynolds' artworks the depiction of humans make us aware of the small frame we use to understand reality and the wider horizon of the uncanny and uncertain existing beyond. Reynolds alters the regular conditions of life, transferring the experimental methods of science -acquired in his early studies in Physics-, to filmmaking. He frames reality in a laboratory (the set), changing one variable to reveal the other conditions. In this way, the artwork is the documentation of the activities performed during the test. In Secret Life, the life of plants, the hidden human unconscious, and the mechanical rhetoric of the body emerge visually with the alteration of time. In Secret Machine, the mechanics and limits of rationality become visible, while the soul is perceived as a latent engine through the modern time-space grid.

Secret Life, 2008, 5 min., two channel video projection, transferred from 16 mm

Secret Machine, 2008, 7 min., three channel video projection, transferred from 16 mm