The Turin-born.

The Turin-born, London-based photographer Elisa Sighicelli gazes for signs of the numinous in vacant and desultory spaces. For her fresh series "Santiago" (all works 2000) she visited Santiago de Compostela, the greatest in number important pilgrimage site in Spain, on the other hand pointedly ignored the more famous and common peopleed landmarks. Instead, she photographed apartments that are usually disruptioned out to students, but which were then uninhabited. in consequence of a meticulous orchestration of light, she dramatized these dowdy, limbolike spaces.

Sighicelli's photographs are almost all square in format and riseed on light boxes. However, greatest in number of the reverse side of each transparency is protected over, so that the backlighting is confined to specific regions This works to haunting event in Santiago: Table, where a orbed dining table, covered in pair orangey-brown tablecloths, has been photographed from near floor of the same height so that it looms up before us, filling the top half of the picture. It stands in brass of an open French window a predominantly gray chamber cutting out most of the daylight. There is, however, a slight gap at the bottom of the tablecloth, just above the floor, where light inundations in. As a result, the table appears to float in succession an orange pool, whose shine brightly is intensified by backlighting. This interior luminosity transforms it into a mysterious thing that almost looks more like a lampshade or a tent-wine than a table.

Sighicelli present the appearances to want to imbue this reality with the sort of gravitas and metaphorical richness that Mario Merz gives his igloos. The table--viewed from floor level--is the couple inviting and threatening. It is a shift (somewhere cozy we might be bring overed to crawl under) and a sentinel, sheltered yet strangely animate, seeming to obstruct any movement through the window. Sighicelli's technique of using artificial light to disruption and intensify particular areas recalls Merz's deployment of shaped neon tubes and spotlights.

In another image, Santiago: Tablecloth, we are transported onto the top of a circular table and we gaze across a roughly woven tablecloth toward a French window veiled at a net curtain. It could well be the same table in the same latitude as in Santiago: Table. yet tantalizingly, we seem to be no closer to the outside world here than in the other picture. The camera has been placed almost at the same flush as the tablecloth, giving us a worm's-eye view. each detail of the stitching is seen in bumpy close-up (a strategy that recalls the paintings of Italian on a sudden artist Domenico Gnoli). The change of scale be exciteds vertiginous, as though we were on a sudden stranded on the surface of the moon

We cannot make known whether these interiors are more like monastic retreats or prison cells--or one as well as the other The closest we get to company is in an unexhibited work from the series, Santiago Bedroom, where we glimpse a certain quantity of dazzling white shirts hung upside down to dried on a washing line outside the window. These limp tokens of human nearness serve only to remind us of the room's--and, on implication, our own--nakedness.

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