- Venue
- South Hill Park Arts Centre
- Location
The recent exhibition at the Bracknell Gallery South Hill Park has been an enjoyable one, uncovering the literacy connection between architecture and narrative.
It is always intriguing to witness how a gallery and its curators handle composing a “musical mash-up” of two unlikely ‘opponents’ such as buildings and storytelling, but surely this exhibit has accomplished that feat. The curators Mary Maclean and Tim Renshaw have previously worked together on the Outside Architecture exhibition at the Stephen Lawrence gallery in 2009 and they also provided an ARC talk behind their chosen artists and their works. Among the exhibitions relationship between architecture and literacy narrative, space plays an important factor in the decision about the art and its surrounding environment which in itself, is storytelling. The curators are not limited to exploring their subject matter through prints and photography, but they have included three video installations that literally ‘project’ stories around the gallery to fully indulge our senses and create a realistic novel; rather like a holographic projected image.
Elements of art and architecture are an interest of the curators and with this exhibition they are meant to demonstrate a further association with architecture. Tim Renshaw deciphers a connection from geometry of particularly spaced architectural spaces and their subjective experience whilst Mary Maclean searches for the way in which architecture implicates itself in our (previous) perceptions and occupations of space.
Architecture, in the words of Mary Maclean is “… the potential release of narrative” and we may interpret this as being about the ‘misunderstanding’ that architecture has a limited energy to offer the world of art. WRONG. Mary claims it is WRONG to think that architecture is just buildings designed to serve a human purpose of conducting economic and social business. This does not just apply to a single entity but also a grouping of buildings and their related or unrelated architecture and how the material form of ‘the work’ operates in the designated space.
The curators mention the useful novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (Italian 1972) as a major source of inspiration as it is generally about the meditations and physical descriptions of cities by the main character, explorer Marco Polo. Invisible Cities, to the curators, is about the building of an idea and not just designing architecture as a backdrop to an event, but rather a story to an individual. Of course, the novel is Fiction itself and perhaps an undeniably important work for any architects to read for the inspiration to dictate an idea for a building that will break away from conventional office-specified constructions.
There are literally ‘Minimal’ sculptures, with a large population of C-Prints, photographs on aluminium from Mary Maclean, with three video installations, paintings by Tim Renshaw and ‘nonconformist constructions’, which should all narrate their own fictional tales.
