The Contradiction of Intimacy

Equal and Opposite

The British-Mexican artist and novelist, Leonora Carrington, once said that ‘To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.’ This interplay between ‘zooming out’ and ‘zooming into’ the human condition through the symbols of the telescope and the microscope is at the heart of Stephanie Lake’s own exploration of humanity in Circle Electric, referenced in the work’s very title. Through music, shape, and patterns, this ballet explores the contradictions of the gaze and the of the human experience.

Alongside Lake’s ‘telescopic vision’ in Circle Electric is the twin microscopic vision, representing her desire to also ‘zoom in’ and explore the intimacy of the human experience through art. As a scientific device, the microscope is a tool to help us see and magnify what the naked eye cannot see on its own. It allows for investigation and exploration of ourselves and the wider world through an intimate perspective. It probes inwards by ironically enlarging the most intimate and intricate details. In art, this relates to our love of miniatures and of miniaturising the physical body, perhaps most famously exemplified by the intimate portraiture known as ‘lover's eye’, which was popular in eighteenth-century Europe, and is seeing a revival in modern times.

Inside Out

‘Lover's eye’ or eye miniatures are a style of portraiture that both magnify and miniaturise the human eye as part of an intimate relationship between viewer and viewed. This style of portraiture, often featured on personal items such as jewellery or personal trinkets, was not meant for public viewing. Unlike other forms of portraiture, it was created for more subjective ends, usually as an object to be carried around by a lover or as a private artistic expression of one’s own subjectivity. In this mode of miniature art, vision is both enlarged and kept hidden as a private experience. It proposed a mode of looking which suggested that in order to look outwards, we must also look inwards.

An Intimate Spectacle

The lines between public and private were however blurred later in history during cinema’s heyday of the Hollywood ‘golden era’, when a voyeuristic camera gaze both zoomed in on the body in intimate close ups, and zoomed out to use that body as a public spectacle of glamour in the Hollywood ‘dream factory’. This blurring is also something that Lake’s Circle Electric tackles head on, in her desire to probe both how ‘profoundly important’ the human body is when we zoom in, and, how ‘insignificant’ we are when zooming out into the wider universe. 

Lake’s ethics of vision is essentially an accurate representation of the contradiction of the human experience of intimacy – a process where we as human beings are both opened up, as well as one where we retreat into the comfort of the miniature and the private. Circle Electric follows from previous artistic investigations by showing us the dual value and precariousness of humanity through its own contradictory and intimate vision.