Before I went away for Christmas though, I went to see an exhibition of Nina Canell’s work at Barbara Wien, (which is a very nice gallery on Linienstrasse, with a great bookshop in the basement.) Anyway, I walked into this gallery by chance when I saw the work through the street window. When I entered I was asked to mind my step around a piece of cardboard packaging lying in the middle of the walkway, with a circle of bones and carefully arranged curled up circles of pink thread. There were bright FRAGILE stickers on the sides. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was a work or not, of if not what it was doing on the floor here, but somehow it set the tone for the rest of the show, where there were always moments of uncertainty, looking at something and questioning whether it constituted art, or was intentional, and then also missing some things which were intentional until I had been in the space for a while. I liked the way this work played with your perception of space through the varying degrees of visibility on which it operated.
The first room which I entered had a construction which was so similar to something which I had made a while ago (pictured), it was almost like seeing a doppelganger… a pole with a little computer fan held a green plastic bag on the wall. It had a very specific aesthetic. While mine just used the minimum of materials necessary to achieve the effect, this was accessorised with tape on the pole, a stand for it and the bright colour of the bag, yet it also had a very make-do aesthetic, which I enjoyed. In the same room was also a pair of insoles and some dust near the edge of the wall.Then in the next room was an installation with a tape player hanging from the ceiling, though I can’t actually seem to recall what was playing… some kind of sound recording. On the other side of the room was what I had initially seen through the window. It was a kind of apparatus whose actual purpose or effect I couldn’t tell. It consisted of a lot of different components: electrical cords and switches, amplifiers, a bowl of ink on a platform with some kind of electronic device inserted into it; a slowly turning piece of cardboard on a pole. There were many small details, like the concrete into which the power boards were inserted and the wad of blue foam on which the wood for the platform was inserted. Despite the amplifiers, I couldn’t hear any sound coming from it, although there seemed to be a timer attached, so maybe I just wasn’t patient enough.
Walking back again, I noticed a bent stick that was fitted with multi-coloured neon lights, a strange symbiosis of the natural and the artificial. I like the way it activated the corner, there, in a way that wasn’t immediately obvious. I found myself looking through a glass door nearby, which viewed onto a layer of dried leaves, lit with fluorescent lights fitted to a metal framework at the level of the floor. I only realised after, that I was looking at another intervention, in which the floor has been purposely removed. I also realised after, as assistants were packing away the box with the bones, that it was an installation that was broken.
This exhibition covered a lot of what I’m interested in, in relation to my own work. I enjoyed it because of its simplicity and its awareness of space, and the way it engages your perception. Experiments with light, small movements, electricity, gravity and other natural phenomena, played with the temporal and the temporary, in which in any moment an event could take place... somehow activating the (extra) ordinary everyday. The work in the front room, in particular seemed like a propositional machine for the production of an event...
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