Hilary Lloyd: watching the lost subject

Hilary Lloyd's arresting exhibition at Raven Row gallery (25 November 2010 to 6 February 2011) contrasts physicality and alienating technology, riffing on the many layers of mediation standing between viewer and knowledge.

Crane (2010) by Hilary Lloyd, installation view

Hilary Lloyd's striking video projection installations have been three years in the making, conceived particularly for Raven Row's gallery space in Spitalfields, east London.

Throughout the exhibition, the visibility of the viewing equipment itself, as a deliberate part of the artworks, is arresting. The panelling, fireplaces and ornamented doorframes of elegant white rooms stand in uneasy contrast to the black sleekness of a TV, mounted on floor-to-ceiling silver poles, squatting close to the connecting doorway to the neighbouring, empty, room. This work is Crane, its soundtrack of syncopated whirring and tapping audible before you can attach the sounds to their source. The mechanical noises recall the tropes of popular sci-fi such as the machine wars of Terminator, ominous and enticing, drawing me up the stairs.

Tunnel (2010) by Hilary Lloyd, installation view

Similar in format, Tunnel occupies the middle of the room, its sounds more aggressive than Crane's. Its screen is split, two views of perhaps a street, blue sky, dropping down from the top of the screen and up again so quickly that slow reflection on the images is prevented. It's fast; the feeling of urgency remains intriguingly unresolved. Moving away through another empty room feels like leaving someone sitting alone, muttering furiously to themselves.

The large ceiling-mounted projectors of Man, Trousers and Motorway are fascinatingly visible and insistent, dangling into the space in which you also walk and stand. They require a response: keep away, walk in the projection's path, maybe stand close and photograph them, almost forgetting the images they're bringing to life on the wall. Trousers shows a close view of a suited figure leaning against a wall, hand in pocket, head and shoulders absent. The twin projections form a floor-to-ceiling stripe of light, each image slowly fading, then present again, upright, upside-down.

Motorway (2010) by Hilary Lloyd, installation view

Motorway similarly shows four overlapping views of motorway construction, geometric girders prominent, richly orange-brown. Nothing here provides a human scale, and the installation feels quiet and unresolvable, as the sound of the occasional passing car utters from speakers beside my head.

Though the projectors feel creaturely, alarmingly physical, confident, I remain more struck by them than by what they 'watch'. Man is both watched and generated by a gang of six projector-eyes, hanging in ranks from the ceiling and showing a patchwork of views of images stuck to a wall, depicting a man in swimming trunks.

Man (2010) by Hilary Lloyd, installation view

Lloyd's camera hovers over his groin and hands, his lips and the shiny surface of the pictures. More than Trousers, this work gives on to richer considerations of why this partial, split-up view is being presented, and as 'man' – a term so much about universality yet also the specific, the instance of humanity, and the construction of gender categories. It seems impossible to access a coherent impression of the subject here; between six machines for seeing, six renditions of what the artist has seen, and one person looking, the subject is lost. There is no longer any human man at the root of this sequence of technological visualisations (photographing, printing, filming, projecting); rather, the alienating sequence itself becomes the point of interest.