- Venue
- Satellite Gallery
- Location
- North East England
On first impressions, Carlie-Rose Laverack’s latest installation is tame and uninteresting; nothing more than a simple, statemental tromp l’oeil. A vapid chipboard door, stripped of its function, provides a uncompromising, opening aesthetic.
The initial effect was bathetic, and I’d imagine, in some ways comparable to arriving at Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece (1969.). Initially insipid and tritely conceptual, AUX encourages a recondite interaction with an inaccessible space.
Before this exhibition, Satellite was a small 3m x 4m extension of a small record shop in Newcastle upon Tyne. A mini white cube project space where you could look at art or just about swing a cat in. Transforming a separate, ancillary space into an architectural augmentation, Laverack creates a seemingly plausible continuation of an everyday commercial environment.
Patiently.. passively.. I stared through an eye-level viewing window, hoping a more interesting aesthetic would allay the prosaic pretentiousness of an unopenable door. The window, however, revealed an equally uninteresting scene; a drab, disconsolate looking corridor scattered with cardboard boxes and a few stray strands of scrumpled paper. Limp, listless and lacklustre, it loitered lifelessly behind the daily activity of alt.vinyl.records.
Created specifically for this site, AUX is a fallacious architectural simulation, deliberately devoid of any obvious aesthetic appeal. Unlike Thomas Demand’s photographed models of politically contentious spaces (Saadam Hussein’s kitchen hideout in Tikrit or the White House Oval Office rendered in cardboard) there is no instant pictorial punctum. Decoding this piece takes time, and only after a long, considered commitment does it start to unravel and gain in complexity.
Laverack uses the same utilitarian materials as a construction worker, and at first, AUX appears to be more about concept than aesthetics. However, after a slightly self conscious and thoroughly disenchanted engagement with this fabricated, characterless construction, it became clear that there was much more to see.
I soon discovered the only functioning feature of Laverack’s manufactured reality; a detail which had somehow previously eluded me. A small surveillance camera, craftily tucked into the corridor’s uppermost corner, was scanning an imperceptible area of the space. Exonerating the bored banality, it encouraged a more curious, intellectual interaction.
Whilst others may more readily have identified this detail, Laverack’s savourless, soporific display had in some way nullified my ability to perceive what was now glaringly obvious. The discovery of the camera, revelatory in effect, breathed new life into the work’s unappetising aesthetic. In fact much more than a trite attempt at tromp l’oeil, AUX contained a secondary skin of meaning; a quiet, nascent narrativity living just beneath the surface.
Stepping back from the scene for the first time, I soon encountered the previously unnoticed television hovering not far above my head. The screen revealed a looped succession of real time images depicting two subsidiary or ‘auxiliary’ spaces. A production studio and recording booth, flickering like footage from Crimewatch, contained a desktop computer, microphone stands and various pieces of electronic equipment.
Laverack responds again to her work’s specific location – a production studio would not be out of place behind a record shop – however, it soon becomes clear that her custom made spaces are unfeasible. Vastly disproportionate to Satellite’s spatial dimensions, they are in fact models, cleverly crafted to appear life-size and lifelike – and they are really quite spectacular.
Rendered specifically to be seen on a screen and not by the naked eye, these small, sculptural works are as convincingly real as the simulated space they occupy. With excruciating attention to detail, they transform an ulterior, unoccupied area into a miniaturised mimesis of a viable space.
Laverack’s televised images, though visually absorbing, are as colourless and characterless as her cold, concomitant corridor. And although we expect them to offer a story; a new layer of conceptual significance, they actually add an additional loop of repeated banality. In turn, AUX becomes a somewhat unsettling tromp l ‘oeil, not of a space or an object, but of a deadened, unalterable state – an inertial, impenetrable purgatory rolling silently into oblivion..
