Trees Heil: Room 01

by James Dyer

Two models are variously splayed and stacked in a small, Paris hotel room. They are staged in Trees Heil’s distinct style that fuses adolescent dress-up with complex eroticism. The room interior is sparsely furnished, like a make-do doll’s house; bed, lamp, side chair.

Despite the bare flesh, silken underwear, and close gentle contact, the models in Room 01 are palpably asexual. There is no suggestion that they desire each other, savour the gaze of the lens, or the eye of the photographer. But they seem chronically aware of the ways they are exposed to these angles of sight; they guard their faces behind hair, a hand, they push themselves into the bedsheets. This timid self-consciousness, along with the harsh lighting and the awkward orientation of the camera, give the photographs a look of private, softcore polaroid snaps. What the models convey is stilted, vulnerable but ultimately trusting. Further, the way they are unflatteringly dressed feels like the work of an amateur director with an image in mind; veiled behind their recording device whilst in front their erotic vision is fumbled into form.

The models’ clothes are a half-worn mismatch of things frumpy, sheer, and furry, from the packet-fresh blue calf-length stockings to the knee-high polished black leather boots. Heil, it seems, gives shape to a fantasy that comes as awkwardly to her as it does her models, there is, as such, something sincere at play here. At a few steps removed from the room, the hotel, the city of love, it’s increasingly clear that the pallid fantasy held in Room 01 is an urge for spectacle.

This series of photographs contrasts Sophie Calle’s 1981 series, The Hotel. Working as a chambermaid in Venice, Calle would search through guests’ belongings, read their diaries, and sift through their bins, taking photographs as she went. Typical of Calle, this was an obsessive kind of investigative portrait photography. The developed images gained their authenticity through the absence of the sitter. In Room 01, by contrast, Heil’s artful obsession is evident in the barefaced construction of the bedroom scenario.

There is, however, still an authenticity in Heil’s photographs. It comes from the inevitable shortcomings of the models, in their ultimate inability to truly occupy, to invade and actualise, that uncertain vision being urged into focus. That is to say, a true fantasy is most efficacious when it retains an indefinite shape, a less-than-tangible form, it is best kept as a feeling, a hazy intuition. Once it is actualised and made specific in action, words, or in image, for instance, it loses some of that necessarily uncertain quality that made it so alluring in the first place.

When Calle peeked and peered, she was drawn to the chance, the accident, the lucky find. By contrast, it is the constructed, the spectacle of the incident itself, not the accidental, that Heil stands over in Room 01. Heil observed that, “of course the room is staged, but it is also utterly real; in an absolute sense, in front of me there are two people laid on top of each other, but this is only one of many other possible ways of seeing what is happening in the room, I just happen to enjoy being physical with people in a way like how animals play with each other’s bodies.”

This is a break from Heil’s usual style that makes the absurdly artificial appear as if it were routine, natural. Here, in Room 01, the scene is forcefully synthetic. Any naturalness of the image is only recognisable once we look through the artistry of the mise en scène to see the scene for what it is. As mundane as that might be, there is something vulnerable at its core and from this point of view, the location, costumes, and poses take on a peculiar uncanniness. It is a traceable fault line running through the entire series that cleaves what is actually going on from the fuzzy designs of fantasy.

In one photograph, the models look almost like mannequins temporarily propped against each other in an upright pose waiting to later be set right and adjusted to take on a more human-like stance. In another, the models’ legs and arms are stiffly interlocked with each other on a chair. It’s a naive, sexless intercourse. What stops all this from appearing too doll-like, though, is a hand softly held in brunette curls, the elastic squeeze of underwear into dimpling flesh, and the distinct sense that each pose is fallible, needing to be kept up, maintained, endured.

There is something in the way Ebba van Beek styled Heil’s models that traces back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s carnal Paris of dancers and sex workers. It’s there in the flowing layers of fabric, dynamic, loose, translucent, and the fluff, frump, and ruff of the thick, off-coloured faux-fur. As a painter of modern life as he lived it, Toulouse-Lautrec offered an uninhibited reach behind the doors of brothels. His 1896 work Seule (Alone) figures a limp sex worker in black stockings hanging over the edge of an unmade bed. It looks like a comfortably familiar scene for the painter; grim but with a tender warmth. Conversely, the bed Heil photographs remains made and the models lumped on top of it seem bloodless. As such, where there was once a dilemma of hedonistic jouissance there is now a despondent, desiccated try at meaningful connection.

Also in Paris' shadowy rooms, in Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel L'Enfer (Hell) the protagonist is a new guest in an old hotel. One evening he notices the light from the room next door being cast into the darkness of his room through a hole in the wall. Much like a photographer, he moves his eye in line with the hole. From there, at a distance as thick as a few rotten planks, bricks and plaster, he imagines the stories of the neighbouring occupants. The protagonist of L'Enfer is a voyeur, what he sees is laced with the tastes of his imagination. As such, the lives of the people next door retain an excess that exists beyond what can be seen through the sketchy viewfinder. Ultimately, the protagonist’s relationship to his neighbours insists on him being obscured from view, breathing lightly, peeking. Heil, on the other hand, is not immediately a voyeur because she is oppressively present in the room, she steps through the viewfinder to direct her models. What they are and what they can become, as such, is the result of how Heil postures them in failing forms with uncertain purpose. Fittingly, Heil shows me a 1988 painting by Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for meaning), that partly inspired Room 01, its strewn form echoes Toulouse-Lautrec’s Seule.

Heil’s Room 01 guards against an insipid visual culture that prizes the immediate, the intuitive, sameness, the readily-known. She does this in a few ways, most notably by emphasising discontinuity – primarily between what is unreal in fantasy and what is made real in lived life – she also makes tangible a sense of deliberation in a medium best known for its instantaneity and she gives narrative shape to a gut-level excitement for the oddity of ambiguity. All this extends beyond what is inherently false in photography, its partiality of frame, insistence on fixity, and openness to interpretation. There is no afterglow in Room 01, instead we are left with the raw obscenity of communication, it’s a numb and lonely feeling.

Photography credits:

Room 01 Photography by Trees Heil

Styling Ebba van Beek

Trees Heil: https://www.treesheil.com/