Precarious Interchange
A Waxy Pith exhibition.
28 OCTOBER – 26 NOVEMBER 2011
OPENING: FRIDAY 28 OCTOBER 19-22H
Presenting new works by:
Stian Ådlandsvik | Sébastien Chou | Juan Fontanive
Sophie Giraux | Antonia Low | Olve Sande
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The air has a curious tinge. Prevalent inside the gallery space is an odd but altogether pleasant feeling. Not quite playful, not quite sober. Positioned roundabout are idiosyncratic works that seem disparate; each is respectful of the other’s personal space, while still close enough to engage in an invisible yet meaningful parlance. It becomes clear that all the pieces are somehow related, as if they were individuals in attendance at a symposium on a subject about which they are each passionate, and each has travelled to this singular venue from a faraway place, bringing to the gathering its own angle of interest and set of values. Variously apparent are aspects of fragility, ruin, illusionism, displacement, accumulation, interference, distortion, transference, mimesis, formation, excavation, and inversion. A selection of these characteristics, intrinsic to each or to one another, dart across the room — some remaining schtum while others softly flap and hum. With modesty, not brashness, each emanates its story, offering to reveal the details to all who venture close. Indeed, imbued in every one of these works, upon its inception and throughout the process of becoming, is a certain precariousness that has thus become essential to its finished state.
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Stian Ådlandsvik is an artist with an archaeological bent. Drawings, photo graphs and sculptures variously materialise from historical and contemporary events and objects that he has evaluated and recontextualised. Reflections of the past intertwine with ideals and visions of the future. His works are often reorganised hybrids, in which the constituent parts derive from precise origins and connections he has explored and dissected, discernable through the unveiling of a certain logic or thought process.
Here Stian has defiantly altered the given characteristics of an ordinary object, albeit obscurely and on the sly. Not being snide about the fact, the traces of this intervening act remain in place, comprising an equal part of the composition; the work hereby includes the very element utilised to achieve this mutation, essentially rendering it a frozen moment.
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As a photographer, Sébastien Chou is inclined to take a background position. A work begins with a seed of inspiration, often brought by collaboration with a musician or writer. On hearing a song or reading a passage, he begins to conceive of imagery that will align with it in an absolute way. Having so homologised, the singular work is permeated with the essence of the source and has thereby inherited its innermost traits, rendering the singular entity independently potent.
On display by Sébastien is a series of photos that directly convey the artist’s inherent response to a newly written song by American poetwritermusiciancomposer Leslie Winer. The undiluted images are conceived as a subliminal response to what he sensed in the music, extending to become his inspirational tool in the development of a video related to the EP released at the end of October.
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Often recycling the mechanical components of found bicycles, clocks and the like to formulate his kinetic artworks, Juan Fontanive’s interest lies in the splendour of sequential and repetitive movement. By handcrafting the constituent parts, including the drawing or painting of characters in some cases, he creates work that overtly assumes a life of its own, a composition of movement accompanied by the inherent sound of the mechanism, delivering multidimensional sensory output saturated in poesy.
A petite contraption fashioned by Juan imitates the imagery and movement of a hummingbird. This elegantly joyful flapping machine echoes its handcrafted composition, in which his individual paintings on pages of soft paper depict the special bird in various stages of flight, all the while contained within a metal box constructed of bicycle parts and other bits and pieces.
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Sophie Giraux is a moulder of poetry. Whether realised through video, projection, sculpture or installation, each of her works is the pure manifestation of its sensorial content. Sometimes at the core is a true story steeped in emotion or nostalgia, others times it is a current contemplation; always, the meaningfulness contained in its expression is ripe, and its physicality, while sound, possesses the patent quality of sheer ephemerality.
In the works of Sophie a powerful otherness reigns. Seen here are an enigmatic rectangle composed of light with wavering edges, a glass box containing a small black circle that vanishes when viewed through a lens, thoughts gleaned from significant readings, told through a projected ellipse, and an intensely matte black block composed purely of powder, poised alongside its damaged twin.
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Context means everything to Antonia Low. She is drawn to accretions, elements that have attached themselves to surfaces within spaces, usually due solely to human habitation. These remnants of activity form the raw material from which her work springs forth, each time uniquely configured in response to the particularity of factors present. In detaching and reinterpreting these standard elements, the hitherto benign fixtures and their formerly hidden underbellies become the most characterful items in the room.
Antonia has addressed the exhibition space itself. Extracting numerous fixtures from their positions on the wall, she exposes surfaces unintended for viewing, their pockmarks revealed, while reinterpreting the detached elements in sculptural form. A small area of external wall is also subject to calculated force by way of an intensive excavation, giving pride of place to the preferably hidden.
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Possessed of a balance of architectural, historical and literary substance, the works of Olve Sande are striking for the peculiar resonance they evoke. Using the materials of ordinary building construction, he interferes with surface structure or rearranges parts, assigning to them an entirely new purpose, generating a form impregnated with autonomously applied reference. Thus charged with meaning his works are at once recognisable and unconventionally contrived.
Situated here is an object resembling a corner window, a pseudopalimpsest. A story by 18th century German writer of late Romantic literature, E.T.A. Hoffmann, tells of how, from his position behind such a window, one man’s entire life, physically disabled by illness, is refigured through his manner of thought. This sculpture refers to the contrary, enabling capacities of a transparent barrier.
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LOCATION: 11 rue de Barchon | 1000 Brussels | Belgium
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