colemanprojects.org.uk
23rd May 2009 – 14th June 2009
Acoustic performance : Friday 22nd May 9pm-late featuring The Mountain Tops Arthur Brick
Coleman Project Space presents Salt Hotel a series of etchings by Zoe Hodgson that draw on landscapes and structures seen both near and far, from South America to South London. The images share an exchange between object and site as well as a sense of an underlying, possibly apocalyptic, world returning.
Some 40,000 years ago, on the Bolivian Altiplano, a giant prehistoric lake began to give up its water to the thin Andean air. This reverse rain left a crystalline desert of 40 square miles, a salt lake known as the “Salar de Uyuni”. In the middle of this seemingly endless expanse of white stands a hotel made entirely of salt. Although a relatively recent structure the hotel seems to share the prehistoric aura of its surroundings. Rather than something built, it seems to have grown, and the cone like shapes of the roofs echo the piles of salt that the local people extract to sell.
Like flicking through a book in which paintings have been submitted to x-ray inspection, Hodgson’s de-saturated and colourless view of the world creates a tonal landscape of petrified moments, a forensic view of the beginnings of things. The aforementioned process is known as a “shadowgraph” and like a photographic negative each image creates an unsettling vision of the world; a retinal after burn that lives on the inside of a closed eye, a Luna landscape full of lies or a dead world returning in the form of a crystal ghost. Despite this ambiguity in the image there is also a strong sense of materiality, a unifying physical presence, like coral coating the bows of a drowned ship. Her eye and etching tool become an incision into the fabric of the world, a tear that allows us to see the ruined bones of time re-flesh themselves, a wound that frames a brutal beauty akin to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) and Frantisek Vlacil (Marketa Lazarova).
