- Venue
- Brewery Tap, 53 Tontine Street, Folkestone, Kent CT20 1JR
- Location
- South East England
August 28 – August 30, 11.00-19.30
August 31 – September 4, 11.00-17.00
I’d still like to see the Governor… takes place at Brewery Tap (UCA’s Project space) in conjunction with the Folkestone Triennial. This is the second opportunity to see Steph Goodger and Julian Rowe’s exhibition centred on historical punitive spaces.
Steph Goodger and Julian Rowe have collaborated on a number of projects over the last eight years. Evolving out of long standing engagement with historical subjects here the focus is on architectural spaces for housing prisoners in the Victorian era.
There is a wonderful contrast in the way the two artists investigate ideas of containment. Goodger’s huge, robust paintings of Victorian prison hulks have a heavy materiality, describing dark, fetid interiors. These floating monsters are the converted war ships that once housed prisoners off the coast of Rochester. The surfaces are constructed with rapid brushstrokes, marking out and building up a skeletal space, layer by layer, cabin by cabin with an earthy palette that talks of dank straw and rough wood. The result is a claustrophobic stack, like a battery farm. There is grandeur here too in the sheer scale and presentation that hints of the ships’ previous incarnation.
Rowe’s pieces; including painting, assemblage and video, offer a dizzying view of repeated forms. Miniature models and paintings are carefully constructed and meticulously handled. Playing with ideas of extending space, a starting point for this body of work is the 19th century Millbank Panopticon prison that used central watchtowers to allow a view of surrounding cells. In his architectural paintings cool colours and subtle tonal modulations are held in balance like a Morandi still life. There is a sense of removal from the true history here, the images are as clean and hopeful as a blueprint and we can enjoy the remarkable geometry of the structure from a safe distance.
The ideas and objects in both artists’ work seem to be presented to us as specimens to be examined. Goodger’s ships are offered sliced open, floating in a void like space. Rowe’s buildings have allowed themselves to become enclosed, contained and ordered into cabinets. His structures along with their reforming ideas have become stained, eroded and grown over in a slow transformation. In the dense, lichenified spaces of the cabinets respite is offered by a Friedrichesque sky, a focal point far away from all this limitless housing.
Inventive forms of spatial construction clearly fascinate both artists and there are intriguing games played here. Rowe’s mirrored vitrine both contains and extends space resulting in an unsettling illusion, a tardis like quality. His architectural paintings use an isometric view, where, like an Ikea diagram forms are three-dimensional but without any recession from perspective. We feel as though we’re hovering above his worlds and we could keep scrolling infinitely in any direction. Like the Panopticon itself there is a recurring theme of seeing and exposing all. Goodger’s hulks are opened up as cross-sections. Reminiscent of early renaissance paintings her work is built of small pockets of space where action could take place, although there are no protagonists here and these spaces are unnervingly unpopulated.
