Ways of Seeing: A review of Fictions
NVA Editor takes a look at Fictions and the new Wasp Room programme
Tether’s growing ambition and confidence are very apparent in the new projects they are currently bringing to public view. A superb Spring/Summer Season brochure of events at the Wasp Room is currently out, with the first show: A Far Sunset, by Tom Down running from 26th March to 11th April. More information can be obtained from www.tether.org.uk.
Meantime Fictions - an extraordinarily bold and interesting multi-artist show curated by Hugh Dichmont and Fay Nicolson - has been running at the Bonington Gallery (Nottingham Trent University) – finishes on 8th April.
Fictions is statedly about the boundaries between fact and fiction and draws heavily on text, language and writing. But it could equally validly be called “Ways Of Seeing”, because it offers a stimulating range of alternative approaches to viewing - as well as ‘reading’ - understood ideas.
Helen Perkins sets out a series of collages, using miscellaneous everyday materials like paint sample charts, scouring pads, pins, corks, a party hat and toy ladders - to create, what? They seem like the ideas an architect might dream in his or her sleep - with ladders rising from building sites to blue spaces in the air - only to forget on awaking what the intended project was all about. Amusing and disturbing.
Glen Jamieson and Aaron Juneau display a three-screen set of images of locations on the now defunct Great Eastern Railway (formerly running between Liverpool Street and Great Yarmouth), overlaid with voices of people who lived near the railway in its heyday. The contrast between nostalgic human recollection of happier times past and the unstoppable reclamation by nature of spaces only temporarily colonised by man, is poignant in its simplicity.
Eugenia Ivanissevich consciously provides alternative “ways of seeing” via a series of devices – mainly distorted ‘periscopes’ – which break up the usual line of vision, but which become objects to see and admire in their own right.
Possibly the most striking work visually is a literally mesmerising film (its constant movement leaves the viewer dizzy and desperate for relief) by Marianna Simnett. Shown on two adjoining wall spaces, the work displays on one a piece of “found” video footage of what appears to be a stalker following a woman around streets in London; the artist has shot a second film which sits alongside the other, tracing the same route but walked in a dizzying state of anxiety, ostensibly capturing the person who may have been the stalker through a series of mirror images – literally, mirrors held up by women in the street. Who is watching whom now? A truly brilliant, unnerving piece of work.
Other pieces deal much more specifically with text, in several cases exploring the challenges of “translation”. Hugh Dichmont uses the full height of the building to set out a series of final pages from classic novels – Kim, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Tess Of The D’Urbervilles and Of Mice And Men amongst others – translating each back and forth between English and Spanish and ultimately creating parodies of themselves. Fay Nicolson challenges the other artists to undertake the recreation of one selected text out of another – a project which is on-going in the gallery throughout the show’s run. Meanwhile, Girolamo Marri asks bizarre prepared questions of passers-by, which challenge the potentially uneasy relationships between different cultures.
Fictions is/was a really fine show which signals how far Tether have come and just how much further they clearly intend to go. A very exciting and seminal moment in Nottingham art history.
