LEONE and McDonald are New York based women artists who have been working collaboratively for about 10 years. Their video installation, "Passing", was originally commissioned as a site specific work for a gallery in Miami, but the pair have now adapted the form of the 33 minute work for the Temple Bar multimedia centre's 16 monitor video wall.
After placing a small ad in a Miami paper headed with the question "Ever Passed for Something You're Not?" the team received hundreds of replies and eventually chose 30 people to interview in search of their "passing" anecdotes. The resulting monologues were edited to fit into 33 minutes and set to play alongside video sequences of the respondents slowly turning full circle or tipping their heads back and forward.
The visual presentation - which is reminiscent of the video for Michael Jackson's Black or White and, as one American critic noted, the opening sequence of the Brady Bunch - suggests that these people are being examined and assessed rather than simply observed. Viewers are invited not just to look, but to read signs, such as skin colour, the shape of facial features, hairstyle, and use these to slot the individuals into broader groups, to decide whether they are watching blacks, whites, hispanics, gays, straights, men and women.
The soundtrack quickly reveals that such signs do not offer access to anything immutable. Everything which might be used to differentiate one race or group of people from another turns out to be untrustworthy. In Black and White, against a montage of similar images, Michael Jackson sings "it doesn't really matter whether you're black or white", but the research of Leone and McDonald covers exactly the areas in which such crisp alternatives collapse.
One woman claims - in voiceover - that people who expect a high degree of education when they hear her English accent on the phone react very differently when they see her dark skin. A lesbian explains how convenient it is to pass for straight. An American youth called Stewart decides that, because of his name, it might be interesting to pass himself off as Scottish, the name itself supposedly being enough to convince people of his authenticity.
Stewart's story, like that of a black drag queen whose anecdote of mistaken identity sounds as though it were filched from Some Like It Hot, has a hollow ring to it. It is as though, over time, both storytellers had slowly added embellishments until there was little left of the original tale. This extra level of chicanery is, of course, hardly surprising in a work about deceiving and being deceived. It would be stranger, indeed, if anything here was offered as an indisputable truth.