- Venue
- Associates
- Location
Inside a blacked out Associates, Gallery Manager Rebecca May Marston bends over backwards into a sharp crab shape, her hands and feet awkwardly face the same direction on the floor. A slide projector balances precariously on top of her stomach. She shakes slightly. Over at the window, Jenny Hogarth parts wide the Venetian blind and carefully clambers feet first into the gallery. Jenny stares intently at Kim Coleman who is sat bolt upright on the floor at the far end of Associates. Kim makes no movements whatsoever. In her hands rests a small projector whose light illuminates Jenny. Red laser beams burn diagonally across the gallery, inches away from the three women who remain motionless, fixed and ready in position. The scene is set for 'Time Bank'.
Next, visitors file six at a time into Associates to find Kim, Jenny and Rebecca poised and ready in this frozen moment. What they are faced with is the freeze-framed two seconds prior to a highly organised robbery or an elaborate museum heist. The after-images of such a scenario are familiar; the daring robbery, the stolen art prize and the action packed getaway, but the tense, private moments beforehand usually remain un-witnessed, outside the frame. However, inside Time Bank the audience are let in on a scene full of possibility, of impending action 'to come'. A vividly imagined but rarely seen 'beforemath'.
The fact that Rebecca, Kim and Jenny are never bodily present within Time Bank, but are projected 35mm slide images, affects nothing of the drama and tension of the moment depicted. The physicality of the projected light, the texture of the slide images and the day glo wire laser beams all make the imminent art theft very real, as does the precision with which the installation is put together. Every projector is choreographed so that the presence of each woman is realised by the projection of her co-conspirator. The shafts of light themselves become visceral, simultaneously sustaining the image of the three women and implicating the visitors that intercept it: one false step into its beam and all three women are obliterated. In this way, the projected light performs the bond between Kim, Jenny and Rebecca. It also serves as metaphor for their collaboration whilst cleverly referencing the self-reflexive content of the show.
Time Bank is clearly about performance, not only the performance of Kim and Jenny – and on this occasion Rebecca – but of the installation itself, the light, the space, and the bodies of visitors that manoeuvre within it. The show is knowing, and often humorous, about the collaborative relationship and exhibition making process it contains. In 'Rebecca Bending over to Make us a Table, 2006' Rebecca is pictured literally bending over backwards in a move that makes a projector table but that can also be seen as a wry comment on the curator/artist working relationship. In addition, the dayglo wire of 'Entrapment, 2006' forces visitors to tiptoe and bend over in Mission Impossible type manoeuvres and thus into complicity with the artists criminal intent. Kim and Jenny's last laugh is surely the thought of Associates staff negotiating this tricky terrain over the coming months every time a visitor rings the gallery doorbell.
Centre stage amid the laser beams, located as the priceless object of the potential heist, is 'Game Plan, 2006': a mahogany plinth containing the layout for Time Bank drawn over the plan of Associates gallery. Two large pairs of large hands (Kim and Jenny's) are superimposed holding pencils over the plan. This god-like view of a miniature Time Bank is disorientating and brings visitors sharply back to an awareness of their own body within the installation. Here again, Time Bank references not only its own making – revealing smaller and smaller versions of itself inside like a Russian 'Matryoshka' Doll- but clearly highlights the presence of its artist-makers. One expects the roof of Associates to be pulled back any minute, a gigantic Kim and Jenny peering in, masters of their game.
