The Poetics of Space Wednesday 12 August, 6.30pm – 7.30pm
Presentation by Dan Holdsworth and Shezad Dawood
Aicon Gallery 8 Heddon Street London W1B 4BU
‘Space Invader’ is a group exhibition that explores the way the spaces that surround us become crowded, polluted, confused, filled and warped. This might be through anything from pollution to electronic overload, from the construction of buildings and cities through to crowds bearing down on the individual. It explores how multiple phenomena overlap onto our personal space, disrupting any sense of splendid isolation and points to a life lived in a world of a multiplicity of languages, tweets, discourses, arguments and assertions bearing down on the individual.
This exhibition is not necessarily a celebration of a globalized space of cultural or economic production – but rather an attempt to pause the torrents for a moment and reflect on what is being lost as much as what is being gained. The exhibition includes works by Vibha Galhotra, Mayyur Gupta,Dan Holdsworth, Caroline McCarthy, Alan Michael, Muzzumil Ruheel and Sanatan Saha.
Dan Holdsworth’s (b.1974, England) photographs often reveal the imprint of human activity on the natural landscape. This might be very subtle – for example, footprints on a snow-covered mountain, through to the dramatic such as the extraordinary construction of the Arecibo Space Observatry in the middle of the Puerto Rican jungle. In ‘Space Invader’ Holdsworth shows two works, one of a partly built motorway viaduct cutting
through the arid landscape of Granada and the other of a field of communication poles set incongruously in a snow-filled field.
Vibha Galhotra’s (b.1978, India) work is concerned with urban sprawl, particularly the ongoing construction, growth demolition and re-building of Delhi. Her use of mannequins in her installation ‘Neo-Camouflage’ suggests that individuals are being consumed by the city, becoming part of its chaotic fabric, whilst also gesturing towards the burgeoning security and surveillance industries. Galhotra’s stance towards the ruthless march of
urban space is nuanced – do we simply adopt and become part of the city or is there any space for resistance?
Mayyur Gupta (b.1961, India) explores the fragmentation of personal space through his wooden sculptures of faces that morph into odd, organic objects. Necks sprout wings or curved armatures. Birds rest incongruously perched on otherwise smoothly carved foreheads. The borders which we keep as individuals are gently broken. Gupta draws on both the legacy of Surrealism but also of classical Indian art to dissolve personal space into the dream-filled subconscious.
Caroline McCarthy (b.1971, Ireland) presents a large-scale installation, ‘Grand Detour’, which takes the forms of a number of watercolours of the waste left on the streets around the Brooklyn gallery Parker’s Box. The drawings form a map on a wall that is painted Venetian Red, recalling the18th century grand tours of young aristocratic English men around Italy. A souvenir shop with printed t-shirts, caps and other items contrasts
the ideal of the tour with its contemporary equivalent of package tours and budgetairlines. The installation can be described as a meditation on the places that we go and the things we leave behind.
Alan Michael’s (b.1967, Scotland) work has often appropriated figures and works from other artists including Balthus, Lucien Freud, Modigliani and Georgia O’Keefe. His crowded work on paper in this exhibition draws together figures painted by Lucian Freud
who tumble into each other’s space. On another level, Michael is disrupting the unified space of the artist, suggesting that the anxiety of influence itself can disrupt or distort the process of making.
Muzzumil Ruheel’s (b.1985, Pakistan)) work explores how we deal with the stuff of everyday life that surrounds us. Ruheel is interested comparing the way that the individual gets lots in his or her surroundings with the idea that every single element that
surrounds a person gains some symbolic value. The mirroring of the scraps of cuttings on the floor, in the photograph on the wall introduces the notion of how we select, edit and re-present what is around us.
Sanatan Saha (b.1975, India) makes paintings that teem with imagery. Figures partly emerge from planes of colour that contain other figures of differing scales and brightly painted animals, which emerge from tropical looking foliage. The overlapping picture planes, use of colour and the tropical imagery echoes Wilfredo Lam’s attempt to fuse surrealism with a Latin American sensibility. Space here is both physically and psychically overloaded.
