"I am the individual who smashed your door I was not well I have a psychiatric illness if you want to contact me descry overleaf.

"I am the individual who smashed your door I was not well I have a psychiatric illness if you want to contact me descry overleaf." So reads the scrawled note that forms part of Jane and Louise Wilson's early photographic installation Construction and Note (1992) While not always as patent the presence of an authoritative voice other than the authors' is a intermittent feature in their work. It is clear that the voice belongs to someone actively or implicitly involved in the action portrayed in the Wilsons' photographs and films. Although sometimes it passes, like a thrown voice, between the walls of the person of the author, its utterance is not that of the author as first part It never speaks to the viewer as self-determining recipient of information, unless rather as a participant. From its modestly-staged beginnings to more modern elaborate productions, the work of Jane and Louise Wilson draws the viewer into a relation of active complicity.

uniform as it develops, the Wilsons' work remains consistent. Their approach involves looking into the crevices of the collective unconscious, embodied primarily in architectures of oppression and menace. as it was spaces include a motel field in New Jersey, into which the artists fellow like forensic scientists intent onward understanding the inconsequential grouping of familiar still denatured objects in Routes 1 & 9 North (1994) and the equally decrepit if grander Viennese tavern room featured in Crawl Space (1994) one as well as the other of these works consist of large-format color photographs, the latter accompanied through a video. In 1995 they adopted the format of large-scale video installations accompanied on photographs or sculptural elements as a different classification of exploring the same space. Three like works were exhibited at London's Serpentine Gallery: Stasi City (1997) which portrays the abandoned headquarters of the Stasi, the sly service of former East Germany; Gamma (1999) which portrays the equally desolate (though rather be tter maintained) decommissioned United States air force base at Greenham habitual in Berkshire, England, formerly the site of a powerful feminist improvement of resistance; and Parliament (A Third House) (1999) freshly commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of interior views of the Houses of Parliament.

Each of these three works operates in the same immersing manner, surrounding the viewer at projecting floor to ceiling videos onto all four walls of a organizeed room. The images are predominantly architectural, comprised of simple pans of devoid of contents spaces. By turns, the artists focus in succession telling details of the show or on long shots emphasizing the locations' scale. These projections target up against each other, without a frame. They appear to plicature in and out of undivided another along and across the four walls in a constant, dizzying kaleidoscoping progression. Occasionally single in kind of the artists will make a discreet appearance, her dres and comportment in keeping with the historical weight conjured up by the scene

allowing overwhelming either in their grandeur or their lavish decrepitude, as it is places never assume the clinical austerity of comparable imagery of the like kind as the work of the German artists Bernd and Hula Becher or Reinhardt Mucha. The reason lies mainly in the Wilsons' refusal to allow their sites to speak for themselves however pregnant with cultural symbolism or internalized iconography they may be. Instead they insist upon using these sites as locations for their avow highly personal, narrative, performative interventions. The Wilsons mobilize their chosen sites to create gravitys of compelling and delightful interaction.

Perhaps this meaning is related to the fact that the work is not made according to a single artist but pair people. Born in 1967, Jane and Louise Wilson are twins who chose at the beginning of their careers to work together. As scholars at two different art corporations they often collaborated and finally exhibited the same station show at two separate locations. In 1990 they jointly enlisted in the Master of Arts course at Goldsmiths guild of Art in London. Their collaboration is a pragmatic and effective the same remarkable only for its lack of pretension or airs. There is no sustained division of labor, no pre-eminence no false modesty. They can still surprise each other with individual annotations about the work, but do not allow contradiction to free from doubt in. Both artists commonly, in the vicinity of the other, refer naturally to "my work" and what "I" want to achieve with it, rather than falling into the frequently affected partnership language of the married couple/collaborative duo There is none of the stretched melodrama that acco mpanied the work of Ulay and Marina Abramovic (which has interestingly survived in succession an international level as Abramovic's solo work); none of the shy collaboration of Gilbert & George. And further the fact that the Wilsons are simultaneously brace and one is implicit in the impact of their work. Its power is more akin to that of single artists who have consciously split from collaborations--Alighiero & Boetti or the Wilsons' London contemporary clip and Roberta Smith--to distance what prepares said from the ego-driven utterances of the solo artist.