- Venue
- Bloc
- Location
- Yorkshire
Make no mistake, Hurth’s sculpture (entitled: drawing (inclusive pictures of all possibilities)) is highly conceptual. It is also strikingly thing – beautiful, grand, immediate. From the outside, the viewer is enticed inside this object, though of course they cannot go – one must walk around the edge, look up, down, across, round, and through. One must look through the sculpture, to see the gallery contextualised; one must stand within the gallery to see the sculpture. Through, from, and into, the viewer is taut within perspective and depth: depth internal to the black 8×4 boards above, to the side, and below; depth between viewer and sculpture and gallery wall. The surface through which we plunge is oiled by the synchronics of the viewing mind, the seeing eye, the feeling body. The self arises from within and without the space made in conjunction with bare wood, black paint, aluminium, and gallery, and in return spills back into these clean vessels of form and space. Numbness and passion become synchronised – the unbattened board at improbable angle, finely balanced between the sane and its binary pole.
Consider perception; direction, source, intent, exclusion; the oval of vision. This thing is object, pure, a foregrounded diachronic of self-projection. Walk around. Look on from all angles. Look into, through, across. Read Hurth’s text. Imagine Bayer’s diagram from which her form is subjectively lifted. Read Hurth’s text as words written in a second language. The risograph-print of shifting register swings its hips over the abyss of theory this side and poetry that, centralising a balance on the passé-partout between (and of) self and other. Allow the lexis to drip its suggestive reference into the pool of your thinking; ‘[b]y each movement of the eye, each movement of the body, it offers a new perspective’[1]. Hurth’s show is conceptual, but it is also physical; it is there, but it is also here.
Look to Cézanne, to still-life angles and planes stacked-up as his studio spontaneously organised itself around his shifting body. Consider his words (I will make you look out from my canvas as you do in life). Perception is a physically dynamic and multidirectional field; surface and depth are instilled with constantly shifting exteroceptional variations in sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell. Self-nature spontaneously arises with amorphous sensory impressions, an observation that instructed Cézanne to technique and his life. Life is at once origination and continuum; Hurth’s sculpture strikes of itself, simultaneously filling up with immediate projection and aesthetic history.
[D]rawing (inclusive pictures of all possibilities) opens up a space or spaces within (at the same time as) a space or spaces, as layers within and without themselves. The show does not settle on any particular layer, but sets up the viewing at the same time in perspective, staging a human and a thing and a place, that we may look, feel, think. The process is linguistic as well as visual (if in fact the visual can ever be free of the linguistic, as opposed to being bound in the reciprocal flux of exchange). Further metaphors for contemplating this transition and stasis between layers is many – the double mirror, the onion, the flower, the vortex, the mind. How free and light we may become from looking at a fashioned wooden frame that stands with painted boards within walls.
For more information, see http://www.dominiquehurth.com/ and http://blocprojects.co.uk/.
[1] Dominique Hurth, a reading in three movements of the same in perspective (extract)
