- Venue
- Campbell Works Gallery
- Location
Forthcoming and foreshortened, probing the shrubbery of private view I am overwhelmingly aware of what this show is and isn't. More in the form of questions than otherwise. No artist knows what they will see when they first enter the exhibition of their work. This is apparently strange and untrue, if they have conceived of the piece many ways over and under its exhibition then they must know it somewhat cerebrally, surely.
On Trust, a project inititated by Claire Nichols with Neil Taylor and Harriet Murray of Campbell Works, asks for a revision of the roles and expectations of curator and artist, and the composite relationship of arts conception to its exhibition. Such a buzz has existed before this show, through the highly sophisticated inter-personalisation of art nerves and scrubbings back and forth. We talked of ‘ideas'- well, there are lots at first, becoming very few as they rhizomorph into an accumulative ‘consensus'. Not of five artists, but of eight plus.
On trust, as I am learning attentively, is elliptical in its placement of artists in calculated misalignment to their ideas. Art nerves become trapped at the centre of a retorted spinal column; Cravo's ‘portugality', the nostalgia of which resounds through the intimate telling of his written proposal is disembodied through Haegele's Rorschach carving which features the country's map tilted and reflected over the corner of the gallery. The antithesis of group show and solo show model formations, both of which conjure a Lion's pride of ego- the plurality ‘talking' deep into the gallery cavern, an ellipse is a low impact shape closer to a shadow or reflection. This is why, as an artist somewhere melted in the trusted consensus of Murrary, Taylor and Nichols, the frequently uttered audience sounds of the "politeness" and "melancholia" of Wilson's displaced floor board poised suicidally between the ceiling and false floor, or Cravo's ghostly neon shell, Vivendas Nerriet, do not excavate idea or meaning; they parch with the slight pieces of us on show in yet another layer of addition.
Eyeballing the empty chair that reflects the things I spoke like liquid into the consensus, I am happier for being trusting and trusted. The young and exciting invigilators who muscle my chair during their automatonic duty to Tide Lines do so for and because of their own highly formed interpersonal nerves and hunger for art, people and art-people experiences. Trust is, newly to me, the disinterested commitment to a desire or a belief, as yet existing formlessly.
With unpalpitated artists Haegele, Wilson, Cravo and perhaps Attanasio there is the fairview if a rebellious want for the materiality of our brainchildren. Talk is of Portugal for the venue. But the more alienated I become from my chair, the more accustomed my standing becomes on the plateau of 'unknowns' that trust so forthcomingly lays between art and its audience. It is so formidably high up here.
