Rae Klein: Second Face

“To hide something is to locate it in some such place, position, or circumstances that it is not generally observed or so to arrange a second thing as to have that effect on the first. For something to be hidden is for it to be in this unobserved state whether or not anyone deliberately placed it so.”
– A. Child, Hiddenness

It is this indeterminacy that Rae Klein plays with—the tenuous dichotomy between the second face that steadily overlays all things and the protean force that has, without will or intention, never stopped pressing against it. Doubleness, Klein suggests, is not a condition imposed on the world—it is the world's own constitution. Second Face does not so much reveal what lies beneath as insist that the disguise—the arrangement itself—is the subject.

In this vision of the world, Fountains are not themselves ornaments—ornamentation is merely the skin they wear, a surface beneath which something restless and formless persists. From them flows matter that is at once dynamic and static, aquatic and metallic; quicksilver as much as water. They preside with a cool, almost sovereign impassivity—and yet something in them unsettles, holding us in the threshold between comfort and paranoia, repose and threat.

This notion finds its creaturely inflection in Two Animals in the Garden. Klein suspends two dogs in the cerulean aether, severed from all context—and in doing so, exposes the limits of domestication. Though we may have brought these animals into the home, conditioned them in the ways of civility, the question of whether they play or fight here remains unanswered. The tilted head of the righthand dog—exultant or goading, we cannot say—subtly punctuates  this instability, leaving us to wonder how many of the other disguises we have affixed to the world are equally unconvincing.
 

In Dream Accomplice, these questions converge on a figure—arms raised, revolvers in hand—whose victory arrives unresolved. Has she torn off her mask, emerging at last into euphoric selfhood? Or is the gesture itself another face, worn with such conviction that it has passed beyond her own awareness? Klein does not say.