Secondary Structures Definitely Uncertain Sculpture. Collyer Bristow Gallery. 5 March 2018.
JILLIAN KNIPE https://wsimag.com/art/36786-secondary-structures
Highly systemised artworks have drastically changed the way they place themselves in the room since Donald Judd's connected cubes stepped across the wall in 'Primary Structures', a 1966 exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum. Back then you could weigh a sculpture's posit and position with certainty. Its austere, macho minimalism asserting the clarity of one, single-minded solution. Surefooted declarations have since been replaced with questions, plurality, ephemerality and a slightly intimidating overlap between sculpture and other practices, disrupting expectations and defying categorisation. One curator who has showcased a number of these tricky works is Rosalind Davis. As in-house gallerist for London law firm Collyer-Bristow, she orchestrates three exhibitions a year. While her curatorial platform is focused on helping emerging artists build their profiles, diversification through exhibiting works of practitioners from their early 20s to mid 70s has helped create a cross-correlation of ideas and networks. Her exhibitions are also mindful of their location. Situated in a law practice, Rosalind acknowledges 'there are lots of links between lawyers and artists - we both have to be creative, problem solve and analyse'. With a nod to imaginative thinking and doing, her 2017-18 show 'Make_Shift' ricocheted off American artist Richard Serra's 1967-68 'Verb List' - itself a call to action guide for the making process - and included contemporary artists Andrea V Wright, Silvina Soria and Andrea Medjesi-Jones. Andrea V Wright's sculptural arrangements slip naturally into peculiar bodyscapes from her background in apparel by 'layering dialogues that relate to design, architecture and fashion'. It's as if she's peeling back the skin and picking apart the remains to understand what's there, what's underneath. The further she investigates, the more skeletal the form and the more it appears to delve into the details of matter in space. 'Vertical Ascension' 2017 is stripped to its bare bones, all limbs and elbows. The expanding, contoured shapes allow air to flow through and around them, activating both as equals. She refers to these as 'impossible planes' using illusion, light and shadow which interact with their surroundings. At times, visual trickery makes it almost impossible to delineate between dimensions, lines in space and lines on the walls. An immersion goes on between the object, the image and the architecture. As if the latter is internalised as part of the object. Perhaps too, as if we internalise the place in which we are situated as part of our identity. Another artist concerned with outlines and outliers is Silvina Soria who creates drawings in space using steel rods, wire, threads and cables. 'Rooting I' 2014 introduces one of her complex structures which, she explains, 'emerge from a nuclear centre and expand centrifugally', building up to a 'mobile cartography'. Using industrial materials, her practice revolves around creating 'underground landscapes'. The puzzling pathways of Silvina's work provoke questions around the structure of concealed systems which power, shape and control our access to services of everyday use, from underground train mapping to network wiring. Who controls their design? Who controls access and exemptions? Are we manipulated into circulating only within its parameters? A nearby step leads to hidden wireless networks which have the device operating independently, behind its friendly interface. While some structures are beyond our sightline, others rule our independence. Andrea Medjesi-Jones's 'Pink Painting Machine' series conveys enclosed rigidity where a paradox arises as the individual who participates in the system becomes an anonymous part of its construction. Then, just when you think there's no way out, that same system becomes as vulnerable as the brittle surface pigment. Her painting uses a particular shade of pink as flesh, which is placed within a windowed structure, providing both containment and constriction. Propped against the nearby wall are wooden poles wrapped in remnants of unpicked canvas, proxy to the production of the painting. The work prompts Vincent Van Gogh's 'The Harvest' 1888 with its rectangular fields and objects of workmanship - ladder, wheelbarrow, fencing. As well as George Stubbs's 'Haymakers' 1785 where white-frocked landworkers, supported by rakes and forks, tumbleweed across the canvas in a composition of perfect diagonal balance. Though critically, Andrea is not upholding a romantic view of labour. Instead, she characterises her work as 'situating the body within cultural and bio-political codes of production, instead of individual networks and relations'. It's all about the framework, not the person. Rosalind Davis also observes this tension between the personal and the order, beginning with a focus on public housing. Aside from her curatorial work, she is a published author and an artist in her own right. Her practice has developed from an exterior view of buildings to stepping inside the room and exploring the space within. 'Haus Constructiv' 2017 is a modular structure of steel, perspex and thread. It plays off last century's constructivist and concrete artists to create a transformative piece which looks to fold, shift, disassemble, lean and reconfigure itself with endless possibilities. Rosalind relates this to her earlier paintings of brutalist and modernist buildings as if she's 'taken the structure and pulled it out and turned it into a sculpture'. Watercolour drawings were a crucial prolepsis to the piece. Indeed the 'drawing in space' nature of the work is upheld when seen through a camera lens. Steel rods become black ink lines while the semi-translucent plastic panels appear as watery paint washes. One functions to hold the piece together; to give it strength. While the other pulses an electric charge of light around the room. Together with its ability to change composition, there is a circular narrative portraying how we move through space while adapting to structure and how we adapt structure to the way we move through space. So there's an ongoing negotiation between our perspective of being external to the structure and our bodily experience of interacting with it. These four artists broaden what was once referred to as "form" into "formation". From a singular shape to an emergence of bringing something or some things into existence. As a result, their work becomes a little more difficult to interpret than their predecessors but is all the more liberated and democratic for it. They have progressed from the mantra of the minimalists who insisted on dealing with only what was in front of them, or, in the words of Frank Stella, 'what you see is what you see', to acknowledging the body, the present unseen and personal histories. These are all arguably and equally what is there in the moment alongside the materials for making. Renowned minimalist Richard Serra was heavily influenced by his experience of working in steel mills as well as going to the shipyards with his Dad. As for anyone, artists have some awareness and subconscious understanding which they bring to the development of their work. And as non-gallery art programmes evolve, such as the one headed by Rosalind Davis at Collyer Bristow, a place is ensured for these artists to not only show and sell their work, but to permeate a working environment, challenging knowns and unknowns for employee and artist alike.
Assembly, Central Space, London. May 2016.
Paul Kilsby
At my university, friends and I had coffee
every day in the same spot, right by the
famous Kurt Schwitters Merzbarn. I felt
I knew every inch of this extraordinary
wall that Schwitters had worked on in
Cumbria. It was there, in the village of
Elterwater, that a farmer had been kind
enough to allow the veteran Dadaist to
create this magpie bricolage between
1946 and his death in 1948. In the
1960s, Richard Hamilton, at that time a
lecturer at Newcastle, learning that the
wall was imperilled, moved it, bit by bit,
reassembling it as faithfully as he and
his team could, at the Hatton Gallery in
Newcastle University, where it lives on
in perpetuity. Years later, in the 1990s,
I was at the opening of a new 'museum'
in London devoted to installation art. A
panel took questions after the inaugural
speeches: what, someone asked, should
be considered the first example of sitespecific installation? The response was
unequivocal and unanimous: Schwitters'
Merzbau in Hannover. Years before he
fled Germany for England via Norway,
Schwitters had made this iconic,
organic, extraordinary incunabulum, this
sculpture/home that grew and grew until
he was compelled to extend into the attic
to accommodate its gradual expansion.
Sadly, it was bombed into oblivion by the
British in 1943. It has been reconstructed,
inevitably, but these resurrections have
about them a quality of pastiche. They
were made at other times and in other
places. Some purists have asserted a
passionate disdain for these homages:
they insist that site-specific means exactly
that, a work made in situ resonates with
a particular genius loci, it makes sense
precisely because the author made it
there, made it then. To re-make the
Merzbau or relocate the Merzbarn, from
this stance, is to violate these principles;
the work, it is argued, is transvalued,
fatally compromised. Well, that ostensibly
high-principled response seems to me
to be rather doctrinaire. As an aspiring
sculpture student, I felt that the Merzbarn
was a daily inspiration, a thing of great
mystery and beauty, with a vital pulse that
had survived its abrupt transplantation.
The three sculptors gathered together
in this Re Assembly have all exhibited
these installations previously, both in
and away from their points of conception
and origin. Are we to consider these
fresh manifestations as an opportunity
for the works to shift and extend their
meaning or, conversely, are they vitiated
as new connotations, new resonances
become overlaid?
Consider Denise Bryan's Der Speigelsaal.
This installation has its origins in Bryan's
two month residency in Berlin in 2012.
It was there that she assimilated a rich
variety of sources as she became a flaneur,
exploring the city through daily discursive
walks, filtering her experiences through
drawing. Another inspiration includes the
opulent eighteenth century palaces of
Berlin, with their ornate Rococo stucco
decorations and their grand mirror-lined
rooms. Fusing these and other sources,
she generated the installation specifically
for the Pavillon am Milchhof, relishing the
repetition of the doubled forms as the
windows of the gallery acted as mirrors
to the piece. Re-installed in the Glass
Tank gallery at Oxford, how are these
multi-layered allusions refracted? As the
gallery's title suggests, it is the abundance
of glass that most vividly characterises
the Oxford venue, so this aspect of the
work's nature is, in fact, revisited in this
incarnation. But do we need to familiarise
ourselves with the work's myth of origin
to understand other details – such as
those fabric swags and festoons which
are draped so expressively over the
rich burgundy geometric frame; these
motifs surely speak of the opulence of
Charlottenburg? Or can we say that
they are formally satisfying in and as
themselves, elegantly resolved sculptural
decisions to be relished sans subtext?
Of course, an ardent formalist would
argue that the ideal setting for any
work of art is the White Cube, that
elusive space purportedly outside of
all local contingencies and inflections.
But we know, don't we, that the formal
contents of any art work are only a
part of its totality and meaning? Indeed,
Joanna Sands' installation title here,
also shown as part of Re Assemble, was
commissioned by an agency dedicated
precisely to investigating what happens
when artists are asked to make work for
specific historically-charged spaces, the
antithesis of the White Cube ideology.
This installation, which indeed uses the
formalist language of minimalism in its
own visual economy, was in fact made,
in its first incarnation, specifically for
a Huguenot house with, remarkably, a
very early synagogue built, as a kind of
seamless extension, in the back garden.
Sands' elegantly sculptural installation
seems to allude to the ebb and flow as,
over time, this locus shifted from worship,
to workshop, to lodging, even serving
once as a venue for English lessons for
Somali immigrants. Perhaps this could
be seen as emblematic of the incessant
cycle of people who arrive, assimilate
and move on in this distinctive area of
London around Brick Lane. Revisited in
the Glass Tank, the work naturally shifts
its register, the space is renegotiated
within a very different social and spatial
matrix. The artist herself, speaking of the
Conceptual aesthetic in which her work
is clearly grounded, has expressed her
doubts that a work of art can ever be
truly unmediated, preferring to emphasise
the exact materiality of her installations,
relishing tangible qualities such as the
grain, patina, and flexibility of her chosen
medium, most often wood. At one time,
Sands made works with some urgency
in improvised spaces, including squats,
her eloquently crafted installations
yielding vital new reverberations in these
marginal spaces. What does it mean for
these elegant arcing constructions, these
curves and walkways, now to inhabit
the orthogonal geometry of the Glass
Tank, a pristine and preened space at the
very centre of a large and mainstream
institution? Sands quotes the laconic
Frank Stella on this issue of interpretation:
'What you see is what you see'. It is, she
believes, up to ourselves, the viewers, to
determine meanings as they emerge in our
own specific encounters with her works,
wherever that may be.
Silvina Soria's installation Rooting
articulates a regularised space, clinging
to the surfaces of the gallery walls with
the discipline of Mercator's projection,
colonising this new space in its supple wire
and cable grip. Chameleon and subversive,
this installation initially masquerades as
utilitarian, it disappears back into the
gallery walls like a gecko into a crack
between stones. Her work reveals, with
subtle and oblique artistry, the lurking
presence of complex rhizome networks of
communications behind our walls, above
our false ceilings, below our feet, that
hidden latticed matrix that binds our space
together. She is a cartographer, mapping
out with each fresh installation both the
overt and covert spatial dynamics of each
exact locus. Looking at her installation in
the Glass Tank we might be reminded of
Harry Beck's iconic map of the London
Underground from the early 1930s
but whereas that represents a radical
and elegant conceptual simplification
of a complex system, Rooting seems to
function rather as its diametric opposite:
a radical and elegant problematising
of the apparent simplicity of urban
communication, whether palpable or
virtual: the metrics of alienation.
And what of that other space these
installations open up for the viewer, the
synaptic space in our own heads formed
by these new relations, as we see each
installation reassembled in the light of
the other? What new dialogues ensue?
What new narratives are started? Where
else might these installations reappear in
the future and how will their meanings
reassemble, yield and shift to fresh
imperatives, new parameters?
Paul Kilsby, May 2016
Secondary Structures Definitely Uncertain Sculpture
5 MARCH 2018
JILLIAN KNIPE https://wsimag.com/art/36786-secondary-structures
Highly systemised artworks have drastically changed the way they place themselves in the room since Donald Judd's connected cubes stepped across the wall in 'Primary Structures', a 1966 exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum. Back then you could weigh a sculpture's posit and position with certainty. Its austere, macho minimalism asserting the clarity of one, single-minded solution. Surefooted declarations have since been replaced with questions, plurality, ephemerality and a slightly intimidating overlap between sculpture and other practices, disrupting expectations and defying categorisation. One curator who has showcased a number of these tricky works is Rosalind Davis. As in-house gallerist for London law firm Collyer-Bristow, she orchestrates three exhibitions a year. While her curatorial platform is focused on helping emerging artists build their profiles, diversification through exhibiting works of practitioners from their early 20s to mid 70s has helped create a cross-correlation of ideas and networks. Her exhibitions are also mindful of their location. Situated in a law practice, Rosalind acknowledges 'there are lots of links between lawyers and artists - we both have to be creative, problem solve and analyse'. With a nod to imaginative thinking and doing, her 2017-18 show 'Make_Shift' ricocheted off American artist Richard Serra's 1967-68 'Verb List' - itself a call to action guide for the making process - and included contemporary artists Andrea V Wright, Silvina Soria and Andrea Medjesi-Jones. Andrea V Wright's sculptural arrangements slip naturally into peculiar bodyscapes from her background in apparel by 'layering dialogues that relate to design, architecture and fashion'. It's as if she's peeling back the skin and picking apart the remains to understand what's there, what's underneath. The further she investigates, the more skeletal the form and the more it appears to delve into the details of matter in space. 'Vertical Ascension' 2017 is stripped to its bare bones, all limbs and elbows. The expanding, contoured shapes allow air to flow through and around them, activating both as equals. She refers to these as 'impossible planes' using illusion, light and shadow which interact with their surroundings. At times, visual trickery makes it almost impossible to delineate between dimensions, lines in space and lines on the walls. An immersion goes on between the object, the image and the architecture. As if the latter is internalised as part of the object. Perhaps too, as if we internalise the place in which we are situated as part of our identity. Another artist concerned with outlines and outliers is Silvina Soria who creates drawings in space using steel rods, wire, threads and cables. 'Rooting I' 2014 introduces one of her complex structures which, she explains, 'emerge from a nuclear centre and expand centrifugally', building up to a 'mobile cartography'. Using industrial materials, her practice revolves around creating 'underground landscapes'. The puzzling pathways of Silvina's work provoke questions around the structure of concealed systems which power, shape and control our access to services of everyday use, from underground train mapping to network wiring. Who controls their design? Who controls access and exemptions? Are we manipulated into circulating only within its parameters? A nearby step leads to hidden wireless networks which have the device operating independently, behind its friendly interface. While some structures are beyond our sightline, others rule our independence. Andrea Medjesi-Jones's 'Pink Painting Machine' series conveys enclosed rigidity where a paradox arises as the individual who participates in the system becomes an anonymous part of its construction. Then, just when you think there's no way out, that same system becomes as vulnerable as the brittle surface pigment. Her painting uses a particular shade of pink as flesh, which is placed within a windowed structure, providing both containment and constriction. Propped against the nearby wall are wooden poles wrapped in remnants of unpicked canvas, proxy to the production of the painting. The work prompts Vincent Van Gogh's 'The Harvest' 1888 with its rectangular fields and objects of workmanship - ladder, wheelbarrow, fencing. As well as George Stubbs's 'Haymakers' 1785 where white-frocked landworkers, supported by rakes and forks, tumbleweed across the canvas in a composition of perfect diagonal balance. Though critically, Andrea is not upholding a romantic view of labour. Instead, she characterises her work as 'situating the body within cultural and bio-political codes of production, instead of individual networks and relations'. It's all about the framework, not the person. Rosalind Davis also observes this tension between the personal and the order, beginning with a focus on public housing. Aside from her curatorial work, she is a published author and an artist in her own right. Her practice has developed from an exterior view of buildings to stepping inside the room and exploring the space within. 'Haus Constructiv' 2017 is a modular structure of steel, perspex and thread. It plays off last century's constructivist and concrete artists to create a transformative piece which looks to fold, shift, disassemble, lean and reconfigure itself with endless possibilities. Rosalind relates this to her earlier paintings of brutalist and modernist buildings as if she's 'taken the structure and pulled it out and turned it into a sculpture'. Watercolour drawings were a crucial prolepsis to the piece. Indeed the 'drawing in space' nature of the work is upheld when seen through a camera lens. Steel rods become black ink lines while the semi-translucent plastic panels appear as watery paint washes. One functions to hold the piece together; to give it strength. While the other pulses an electric charge of light around the room. Together with its ability to change composition, there is a circular narrative portraying how we move through space while adapting to structure and how we adapt structure to the way we move through space. So there's an ongoing negotiation between our perspective of being external to the structure and our bodily experience of interacting with it. These four artists broaden what was once referred to as "form" into "formation". From a singular shape to an emergence of bringing something or some things into existence. As a result, their work becomes a little more difficult to interpret than their predecessors but is all the more liberated and democratic for it. They have progressed from the mantra of the minimalists who insisted on dealing with only what was in front of them, or, in the words of Frank Stella, 'what you see is what you see', to acknowledging the body, the present unseen and personal histories. These are all arguably and equally what is there in the moment alongside the materials for making. Renowned minimalist Richard Serra was heavily influenced by his experience of working in steel mills as well as going to the shipyards with his Dad. As for anyone, artists have some awareness and subconscious understanding which they bring to the development of their work. And as non-gallery art programmes evolve, such as the one headed by Rosalind Davis at Collyer Bristow, a place is ensured for these artists to not only show and sell their work, but to permeate a working environment, challenging knowns and unknowns for employee and artist alike.