Saatchi Gallery Visit
Last week I visited The Saatchi Gallery where I saw a lot of different work, some of which has influenced the work I am producing.
The first artist that struck me was Rafael Gomezbarros with his installation ‘Casa Tomada’ or ‘Taken Home’.
Conceptually the work deals with the trouble of millions of displaced people who constitute the invisible but pervasive mass of immigrants crossing the planet. The installation is an army of head sized ants covering three large walls. Viewing the work in person is in some ways quite overwhelming. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I seemed to have responded more to that piece than to any other artwork I have seen.
It is almost uncanny in it’s realness- especially the corners where the ants are crowded upon one another. When viewing from up close there is a sense of the abject about the work. The fact that the bodies of the ants are made by assembling two skull cast I think adds to this.
I think my initial reaction to the work was based on the sheer size/ scale of it. I’m not entirely sure if this is something I can recreate within my own work in terms of my initial reaction. I remember first looking at the piece and felt as if my hairs stood on end and felt the urge to brush myself off to make sure there wasn’t anything on me. I think the feeling of being overwhelmed is a combination between the size and the unsettling effect an army or insects has on a person.
I don’t believe this is something I can achieve entirely, partly due to the huge size of Rafael Gomezbarros’s work but mostly due to the connotations that ants hold, in comparison to a mixture of colours and lines which have almost none.
Jackie Saccoccio is another artist whose work particularly stood out for me. Saccoccio refers to her work as an “psychological form of Cubism” because multiple stages of her process remain visible in the final work. It is this point in particular that fascinated me- and something I hope to try to reproduce in some of my own works.
