Art Review - February Issue - (Page 129)

Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 REVIEWS TIME BANK KIM COLEMAN JENNY HOGARTH: TIME BANK A S S O C I A T E S G A L L E R Y, L O N D O N 3 0 N O V E M B E R – 16 D E C E M B E R Aesthetically, Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth’s Time Bank absorbs you as soon as you open the gallery door. Its ideas, meanings and e ects, on the other hand, are a little more wilfully reticent. Although the show comprises seven individual works, they criss-cross literally and associatively, demanding a somewhat protracted process of disentanglement. Entrapment all works 2006 , a three-dimensional geometric drawing made in red GloWire, fills the space, connecting its architectural limits as well as the wall-based works. Pictorially it speaks of science fiction or elaborate puzzles or the geometric archetypes found in a classical painter’s studio. Its scale, too, implies an unidentified ludic and participatory function, like a diagram divorced from its referent. To consider Time Bank, it seems, is to puzzle over puzzles. The dim conditions required for Entrapment to glow portentously demand that the viewer peer closely at a series of wall-mounted photograms, forcing the eye to really push the limits of its retinal cones. It takes a while before images of a set square, a series of intersecting circles – perhaps co ee rings or bangles – and venetian blinds become apparent. In some instances the image never quite declares itself, belligerently clutching onto some cabalistic information. Two projector pieces, on the other hand, have a self-contained logic that delivers itself instantly and intact. Rebecca Bending Over Backwards to Make Us a Table does exactly what it claims: a projected image of a woman making like a crab appears to serve as the base for a real glass shelf attached to the wall. The pun is twofold, visually hingeing on the intersection between representation and reality, while on the linguistic level Rebecca is indeed going out of her way to make a table. This second reading is elaborated in an interview with the artists, where they describe the narrative of the show as being ‘about people kind of working together collaboratively… about people being creative’. Bending over backwards, then, becomes analogous to the processes of give and take that collaboration necessitates. And presumably Infinite Us’s – in which projected images show the artists holding the projectors that project the other’s image, implying an endless regress of representations – becomes an illustration of the pair’s interdependency. This self-referential play is both the interesting and fallible essence of the work. A single work neatly forms a mise en abîme of the show and collaborative practice as a whole, but the relationship between narrative and image is somewhat indexical. Coleman & Hogarth established the Embassy, an artist-run space in Edinburgh that shows international work with a strong performative and event-based programme, but to reduce this to tropes and static images is to schematise its infinite variegations. Sally O’Reilly Rebecca Bending Over Backwards to Make Us a Table, 2006, glass shelf, 35mm slides, slide projector, dimensions variable. Photo: Oliver Marlow. Courtesy Associates Gallery, London ARTREVIEW p123-138 Reviews AR Feb07.indd 129 3/1/07 03:14:02  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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