- Venue
- Danielle Arnaud Contemporary art
- Location
‘Enclosure speaks of containment and control. It is the physical or conceptual creation of a bounded territory or zone. Physical or pictorial acts of enclosure imply an extreme selectivity,where what is out of the frame is separated by a void space, implying a hermetically sealed microcosm free from outside influence or interference. Ideas of separation and entrapment are mirrored by fantasies of sanctuary and escape – the suspect enchantment of a snow-dome, the utopian dreams engendered by a map taken as reality, the encapsulation of an ideal within the impenetrable bounds of a picture, a package,a glass box, a screen.’ (Exhibition notes)
With no white cube or West end ambience the works, 14 pieces by 6 artists, feel at home in this Georgian townhouse. Steven Waters’ large walnut Hagioscope comfortably furnishes an alcove, Gabriela Schutz’ ‘Your Five a Day’ consisting of a white framed etching of each of five as yet unopened supermarket packs of vegetables and fruits, printed five times – 25 in all – deposited after the visit to Morrison’s, in the entrance lobby. How nice of the supermarkets to help us with our prescribed ‘5 A Day’, or are we helping them? Boundaries blur under cover of mutual exploitation. The etching process, wax ground, acid, inking and wiping, printing, damp paper, hands covered with whiting powder and ink, seems a world away from the processes of agribusiness, mass production, standardisation, mechanised packaging.
From the eponymous series, HOLYLAND, (Beit Arye) and HOLYLAND (Padu’el) face each other across a small lobby. Depicting Jewish settlements in Palestine, drawn in Charcoal, 190 x 230 cm these are large drawings. The sign, HOLYLAND is drawn black on one. On the other it remains paper white, in the manner of HOLLYWOOD’s sign. Both signify dreams, plausible myths in the desert. High skylines are topped by settlements.The inverse parallel between ‘settlements’ and native reservations implicit in the notion of ‘manifest destiny’ resonates. Occupation seeks the high ground. Intentionally symbolic or not, each piece consists of two vertically abutted sheets held in place with pins. As HOLY and LAND on each piece conjoin as ‘HOLYLAND’, possible separation remains. To hold the corners, nails.
Upstairs in the Green Room, the hum of a projector whispers to a screen, ‘Hold this.’ Vignettes appear , soundless. For this piece, ‘Everglade,’ by Marion Coutts, ten images taken from parkland, are cut free from context and suspended as vignettes in the brightness of a projector screen. Grass flows, leaves move, people walk, sit, gesture. There is no sky, no sun, no breeze, no foreground, but an appeal to memory and to its setting aside. To see, memory must be pruned. (but the cuttings kept handy)The projector reaches out, places its gift of light. The gift flutters, twitches, brightens, darkens, fades away, at one with the material stuff of projection, image as object and transaction. We see movement, and remember similar objects that moved. We remember being with leaves that rustled, grass that flowed in the breeze under a cloudy sky. But here only the projector whispers, no other sound is heard, nor breeze felt, no sky nor clouds, not silent but mute.
Across the room, Dan Hays’ ‘Picture Box’ does with its title what the painting does with space. The words twist and turn. A Picture Box might contain ‘pictures’, or constitute a ‘picture’. A picture ‘is’ something and can be ‘of’ something, refer to and remind us of something. This is a picture of a hamster cage? Well yes and no; there is an apparent hamster cage. Does the title bamboozle us into looking for the picture in the painting? Hamster cage as pictorial device? Or compositional device?The visual (pictorial?) space might be loosely considered to be the ‘box’. Despite its natural looking shadows the cage stands on a linear RGB background that traverses the canvas. Shadows imply a curve or fold in the background from vertical to horizontal, that is denied by the continuation of parallel lines of colour from top to bottom of the painting. Perspective and flatness create a contradiction that cannot be resolved. The painting is flat-the space is illusory. The space is real – the flatness is illusory. Do I mistake tonal changes for light and shade? Well yes and no. The spatial conundrum ( Hays uses this term with reference to the work on his site danhays.org) continues in the use of coloured stripes between the bars at the back and top of the cage appearing to connect spatially distant bars whilst remaining apparently flat lines on the painting surface. And what of the absence of a door?
Dan Hayes smaller piece, ‘Flat Screen’ resembles, from a distance, a tapestry fire-screen and its display above an empty (redundant?) fireplace, is suggestive of the decorative and functional. Its viscerality counters the title’s suggestion of a digital ‘flat screen’, painted as it is on heavy canvas, with a plain ivory border enhancing the tapestry feel.The subject-matter upon which the painting hangs is an artificial island surrounded by a moat and stone wall on which some kind of primate, chimpanzees possibly, are constrained. A structure possibly housing ropes and swings for the amusement of the animals is visible ( for the entertainment of the visitor) from the spectator side of the wall. We see the painting’s grid form of dots of colour clearly, the apes ‘unclearly’ as presence rather than identity.
Stephen Walters’ Nova Utopia is a map and an Island. Based upon an original illustration for Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ it cannot be seen in its totality. Rather, the viewer must navigate across the drawing with a magnifying glass set into the shutters, luxurious in rich walnut veneer, of the Hagioscope in which it is housed.
Undercurrents of dissent are discernible in Utopia. Rather as in our contemporary state, corruptions of language, and corporate and state practice, drape another veneer of joy and respectability over questionable privatisations, accumulations of wealth institutionalised injustice. In a nod to what might be coming to sites near us all, we discover the ‘….fully staff-less Supersaver Deals Shopping Mall on the outskirts of Aircastle’. (and maybe somewhere on the island, its own Bob Crow)
Walters also shows two drawings, ‘The Woods Where Them Live’, and ‘Of This wood Men Shall Know Nothing.’ – we remember these places, places like them, where we played as children. Full of mystery, dripping with soft mosses, essentially benign, – but?, With concomitant softness of paper and tone, he draws gently so as not to disturb. Knowing corrupts. Leave ‘Them’ alone.
If a first impression of his marks are anything to go by, Eyal Sasson loves the act of painting.
But there is too an equivocal quality to his ‘Bather’ and ‘Riverside’. Wide insistent marks seem simultaneously to harbour uncertainty, as though skimmed quickly onto to the paper surface lest they escape the painting. Perhaps this has something to do with their deliberately decorative nature. Acrylic paint, thinned and applied in washed strokes echoes the printing process whereby overprinting creates new colour and tone, which in turn insinuates the notion of reproduction into the works. Elsewhere, in the Yellow Room, his ‘American Beauty’ is a dark painting. Is this cabin in the wilderness or on a suburban street? Snow falls at night, peculiarly circular flakes enhance a feeling of strangeness. Wilderness is a suburban street.
Sarah Woodfine’s ‘How to grow an apple tree’ consists of a plant stand upon which a plant pot stands,containing a rolled-up drawing of a truncated tree with a hint of Magnolia in its bud. Except for the drawing, all is immaculately white. A snake is coiled around the trunk of the tree. It is as though the drawing has been deposited by someone in passing, rather like keys or a purse might be left temporarily on such a table in a hallway or lobby.
It would take something akin to a giant to shake the snow in Woodfine’s large Snowdome piece ‘Castle’ Viewed from the front a romantic but disconcerting castle is drawn with great precision. This castle is not of stone. Lines like the grain of wood create its surface. Door and windows remain white, a suggestion of something magically intense going on inside. Go to the back, and there is no inside. Through door and windows now is the black sky. Floors extend outward from the back in the manner of a dolls-house waiting to be furnished. Magical snow, reminiscent of childhood mornings when excited opening of bedroom curtains confirmed the overnight fall, covers the ground But strangely, there is no snow on the castle roof, or rocks beside.
The range of media and material here, used to engage with ideas, points also at another enclosure, a dispositional one of touch, feel, preference. Choices open to us in our own enclosures of self affirm and reaffirm identity. Intuitive preferences of vision and touch underly the graphic precision of Sarah Woodfine’s drawing. So too Stephen Walters’ sense of pleasure in his use of soft pencil for ironic description. Gabriela Schutz’ touch with charcoal is a moral one, whilst Eyal Sasson is at one with and under the skin of his painting. Dan Hays’ tightly enclosed works are perversely pleasurable in tactile repetition. Marion Coutts reproduces an intense longing, her images perpetually within reach and beyond touch. Curator, artist, viewer, all negotiate others’ enclosures and in so doing transform their own.
