- Venue
- studio 1.1
- Location
- London
Shoreditch gallery studio 1.1 displays Amanda Loomes latest instillation work ‘Spoil and Fill’. Before deciding to become an artist, Loomes had worked in construction. This exhibit highlights her previous occupation with particular attachment to 80 Bishopgate.
Although the building was hit by an IRA bomb in 1993, rebuilt, and demolished in 2011, Loomes alludes to very little of this in the work. The piece is arranged into one hundred and forty-forty small concrete blocks with a video projected to its side. The written information provided about the work makes allusion to ideas of entropy, but the work itself doesn’t seem to relate to that.
What takes place next is what I can only equate to a situation common amongst friends. One of the pair of friends, shows all the pictures of all the places they’ve been. It’s a sort of recognition of events, that ‘this actually happened’ and ‘hey, look, that’s me!’—type of thing. Naturally, this recounting of events is only of serious interest to one of the couples, as there is only one who engages in this act of recollection.
A similar feeling of alienation leaves the viewer to comprehend the feeling they’re not completely ‘getting’ everything. Loomes’ past hovers over the work like a ghost of memory, but one feels that it’s just for the artist’s benefit. Moreover, the confided space of the studio 1.1 makes the experience more claustrophobic.
In the end, this work remains very much on the surface, like the pictures of a friend’s trip. That may say more about memory, than art. But it reminds us that art’s obsequious function is of evidence to tell very little without saying very much, or at all.
