- Venue
- No Format Gallery Second Floor studios & Arts Harrington Way (off Warspite Road) Woolwich, London SE9 5NR
- Location
- London
‘The artists in this exhibition are not directly concerned with this recursive process in their work, meaning their work is not necessarily about this topic. However, the work in this exhibition shows evidence of this process in action. In essence this exhibition looks at the thought process involved in the artists’ internal processing of personal history. These are examples of how the contemplation of self becomes visible through their artwork .’ ( From the Premise Statement for RECURSIVE, Jane Boyer 2014) Five artists, Hitomi Kammai, Ant Pearce, Susan Francis, Simon Fell, and Jane Boyer, (who also curates by invitation from Hitomi Kammai), contribute video, graphite, paint, clay, fishing line, broken medicine bottles, sound, stitches, line, text, paper, various found objects, stories, questions, provocations, photographs, books, stains; and violence resonates inthe stillnes of Susan Francis’ ‘Palace of Sham’. A lampshade minus its bulb lies on the floor near a puce coloured window-blind which hangs splattered maybe with tea, so domestic. Its skin-like surface is cut, ribbons and pieces of material peeling to the floor. Comic-cartoon-like in its composition, it is the the set of a drama, waiting for the play to repeat. Meanwhile, the cast of a ceiling rose in her piece,. ‘A Dangerous Crossing’ is ‘propped’ against the opposite wall. In ‘A Private Matter’ digital images, small public pointers to a private event, evocatively red-stain waxed organza swatches, pierced by pins that attach them to the wall.
‘How does it feel to be alone in the universe?’ the question is posed to an Ultra-Terrestrial in Hitomi Kammai’s drawn work, aloneness possible only in the knowledge that somewhere there are others. The other asks the question.The delicacy of her line belies enormity of content. In the background, the musical accompaniment to her video, ‘Ecstacy’, rings like the line in her drawings, fine and sharp, in a piece that alludes to the pleasures of Eve’s loss of a certain kind of innocence.
The innocence implicit in Simon Fell’s ‘Autobiography’ is altogether punnier. Everyday aspects of play are discernible in this series of nine unglazed earthenware toy-like cars. Like a wagon train under siege, a circle of eight with one in the middle, simultaneously reflecting the absorption and vulnerability of the player.
His ‘Treasure Chest’ alludes to the past? The ceramic work is prominent as you enter the gallery, a glazed spanner standing proud in the chest along with what might be a piece of toast, a wine bottle, barrell -like objects, and pieces that recall steel turning tools or toy houses, and a handgun. A handgun in a treasure chest, threat behind the smile? It is a pleasurably mischevious, anomalous piece, gently teasing the concerns of its neighbours, modernist comma in a postmodern sentence. And the spanner knowingly tips its hat to the recursiveness of doing and undoing, of pressure and release, turn and re-turn.
Ant Pearce is concerned with the prison that is the human condition. ‘External Authority’ is a series ( much of his work is produced in thematic series), of pairs of portraits stitched into paper, on one side the linear tracing of a portrait, next to it a reflected image, now an underlying drawing ‘de-faced’ by criss-crossed threads that ultimately hang loosely from the abstracted image with an air of finality and resignation. Elsewhere, he tells us that ‘in this series…..I depict a series of significant figures that have been in a position of authority for me from my childhood to the present day.’ (antpearce.com) Father and Son, a piece from another series connects their portraits in a linear, loosely constructed manner, with emulsion paint and cotton thread, determined and indeterminate.
The larger of Jane Boyer’s two pieces makes us work hard at the looking. ‘The Story of Telling a Story’ is laid out on the floor. The dificulty of looking at a flat work on the floor, vis-a-vis the wall surprises, makes it scuptural. You must walk around it. It raises curatorial concerns, curation as making, artworks as material. What should go where? How can it mean?
The eclectic mix of, ‘styles’ in this show is particularly pertinent to its theme. Pointing through the work to its maker, it points up consistency and idiosyncrasy of self in a recursive continuum of identity. Style is meaning, technique, a visceral thing, thought through nerve endings, turning the spanner, sewing the portrait, forming the clay, touching the canvas, making the mark, seeing the light.
Project Blogsite: http://projectrecursive.wordpress.com/
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