It is sudden: you are at the end of a footpath leading out to a vanishing point. All around its horizontal plane you see it, the hanging garden: flower heads floating down like skirts, thin as paper and a little torn around their edges. The floating space blinks between its floating dandelions and delicate wings and you notice your body is missing, you misplaced yourself in this mytho-digital dream of that forgotten hanging garden, that glint like Babylon. For Homage VR enacts the same site of a living ruin, the same kind of turning to look back at the world that will not stay. In this sense, Mamiye's Homage VR is always threshold: it is a field of open signifiers that always already awaits a gaze, a witness to the unstable lanscape between the screen and the fragmented image of memory.
In Homage VR, Irene Mamiye juxtaposes the physical with the digital, using contemporary technologies to extend toward a virtual landscape. This obsession has stretched itself into a diverse body of work, but is now most brightly illuminated in the artist’s premier virtual reality environment. Entering the piece is an arrival, for what has only revealed itself as an awkward headset apparatus slips over your eyes and becomes a bell jar, lit up and rounded like a fisheye lens. Instead of positioned outside looking in, the viewer is submerged in an interior abundance of fragmentation––source imagery of flora, stems, and stamens plucked from the scroll of whatever could grow out of an Instagram feed. What drags the viewer like a magnet through the layers of stained vectors are their own collective and personal memories. For Homage is a rare world and brief for it, illuminating a possible future for visual art that suspends the viewer in the placeless place just beyond the edge of themselves. Homage, then, is a confrontation between the subject and her invisible double, affirming her own inner world by wandering offscreen, held and unbodied in a garden without shadows.
Homage 6928, 36" x 36", Dye-sublimation Prints On Iodized Aluminum
