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echo echo
08/12/05 - 21/01/06
Alex Pollard / Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan
curated by Jason Bowman and Rachel Bradley
An echo is a sound that bounces off a surface and is heard for
a second time. The title echo echo implies a further repetition
of that repeated sound, signalling a feedback loop which, as well
as emerging from a past event, extends its possible reverberations
into the future like an aural premonition. Thus echo echo can be
read both literally and metaphorically. Alex Pollard and Joanne
Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan (along with Cathy Wilkes) were
commissioned to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale this
year in an exhibition entitled Scotland and Venice: Selective Memory,
and then again this autumn at the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art, in a related exhibition called Selective Memory: Scotland
and Venice Biennale. The work showing at the Collective Gallery
is a linking permutation in this sequence, echoing each of these
two manifestations. Although the work currently on show at the
SNGMA is related to the Venice exhibition, the artists have taken
the opportunity to home in on elements that ‘sounded’ in
their first show, and develop them into new sets of propositions.
Crucially for the curators of all three exhibitions, Jason E. Bowman
and Rachel Bradley, the artistic practices here are particularly
concerned with time, and with the fact that meaning in art is found
in the repetitions and differences that occur from one artwork
to another. As each body of work expands through time, it is as
if it generates a particular dialect that mirrors, but also distorts,
the established language of art - like a play within a play.
Alex Pollard’s disembodied arms and miniature beasts are
constructed with pretend brushes, pencils and rulers that he has
meticulously crafted in jesmonite plaster. These creatures possess
the uncanny mechanics of puppets or articulated models, and seem
on the verge of twitching into jerky, primitive life. While Beast
recalls Hollywood’s early, rather poignant, attempts at special-effects
dinosaurs, Thing pays tribute to the disembodied hand in the Addams
Family. The ‘portrait of an artist’ relief on the wall
has the halo of exclamation marks that, in the language of cartoons,
denotes surprise or alarm. Like Dr Frankenstein, he surveys his
creations (and indeed himself) with astonishment, and some trepidation.
Rulers and paintbrushes are the instruments of the rational enlightened
practices of engineering and art. But broken apart and cobbled
together in irrational ways, they become, like Frankenstein’s
monster, a diabolical aberration of their former selves. If these
scrapheap creatures were to start to move, their clicking and scratching
would likely give us the ‘creeps’. Part of our ambivalence
towards these toy-like figures is explained by the fact that, in
order to move, a thing must either be sentient, or else manipulated
telepathically by a force outside itself. Either way, such a consciousness
cannot possibly be human – and therefore it threatens to
collapse our whole scientistic world view. As Freud argued, our
culture’s quest for mastery over phenomena has lead us to
repress our ancestors’ belief in magic, thus any intimations
of magic generate a shudder of uncanny fascination/repulsion.
Like a troupe of acrobats, or the participants in a game of musical
chairs, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan’s objects,
colours, materials, and their titles, are repeatedly replicated,
dissected, disassembled, and reassembled in new configurations/installations.
In a series of drawings (commissioned by the artists from Simon
Manfield), some of their recurring ‘objects’ are represented
in an archive of fantastical scenarios: an echo of echoes. Top-hatted
Victorian gents act as the artists’ proxies - and ours -
and despite being hampered by paradoxes and blind-spots, they are
seen pursuing meaning up and down the avenues of engineering, thinking,
pastoral landscaping, reading, chasing and gaming.
Each drawing re-stages one of Tatham and O’ Sullivan’s
objects. In settings reminiscent of optical illusions or newspaper
puzzles, they are revealed as conundrums. We are less accustomed
to thinking of factual material objects as ambiguous, and yet,
as Tatham and O’Sullivan’s work implies, that is exactly
what they are. Constructed in the same way as closed boxes or open
frames (or indeed a combination of the two) their cubes and open
rectangles, pyramids and wedges, giant letters and stick-men all
seem to be containers or apertures for something more important
than themselves. Sensing this pregnant emptiness, we might look
to the relationships between the objects for a sign of signification.
Like pieces on a chess board, the viewer must try to decode the
objects’ respective ‘value’ in relation to each
other in order to enter into the game, and, as in chess, the same
object will function differently in different locations and situations.
Thus, with the shifting scale of Alice in Wonderland logic, the ‘Think
Thingamajig’ (a cube each side of which is divided into a
diamond and four triangles) re-appears as an absurd croquet ball
in It is, it is, the way, that is, and as a costume/cage for the
harlequin/philosopher in Think, think thingamijig, think. Whether
this particular gent is venerated like Rodin’s Thinker, or
mocked like Watteau’s Pierrot, we cannot tell, just as we
cannot say which gent will win out in Now, this has reached the
limit conditions of its own rhetoric. In these, as in every image,
doubles and dichotomies ensnare the viewer in an eternal game of
enquiry, where finding a definitive answer is not necessarily the
aim.
Kirstie Skinner
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