Freshly Broken Surfaces is a conversation in two parts. A dialogue looping in and out: is there anything in between the surface, its skin, its weight? Maybe. Tell me about its continuous impact on this world? Later perhaps. When we touch a surface how close are we to its depth?
Rowena Hughes and Athanasios Argianas have been working in parallel for more than a decade. Both artists structure their work using systems, language games, closed circuits and arbitrary choice functions which loop internally and then fall free; in free fall. It is the glance at this moment of disequilibrium that lets you bask in the pleasure of their work. Is it attractive? Come on, just leave me alone. Their work undulates between the designated opposites of direct experience versus mediated, analogue as opposed to digital, the virtual and the hands on. If in Argianas’ casts one feels the imprint of weight literally being pushed through matter, in Hughes’ screens the impulse to literally cut out space (and transcend it) is tangible. But the world is flat! Yes, indeed!
Rowena Hughes’ works, ‘Wrung or Pressed Against’ are based on the shape of contemporary life’s view onto the world: standard screen dimensions. This is what we look at when we look at art. The context is a structural game of representations where the real and the virtual interplay. Real elastic bands hold together the glass surfaces that press together the cut-out representations of elastic bands. Surfaces stacked together to the point of bursting, layers added to layers until they become depth. Hovering between objecthood and flatness, the screens trapped together allow for an uncertain game of shadows; with each layer there is a shift from two dimensionality to three. Each resulting object contains a shadow of its former self: its ontology and its poesis. These works frame the shifting gravities of our worlds. Not dissimilar to Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Lichtspiel’ play of forms (light and shadow) the cut-out prints of elastic bands echo looping film reels, and the nebulous choreography of structures and surfaces in between. Time is measured in their form.
Hughes is also interested in the mythical properties of things: from the mundane (elastic bands) to the rare (delicate silk threads from the Pinna Nobilis). Can anything become tinged with potency if looked at enough? Without doubt. The shining sea silk threads loop, flutter and flirt with the printed forms of elastic, a tongue in cheek dialogue, a value system turned on its head, a skeleton dance (an embrace of disparate parts). Will you dance with me?
A collection of found stones stand intertwined with their printed adversaries in Hughes series ‘Elasticity, Fracture & Flow’. Their voracious shapes literally punch holes into space. Locked as if in battle, in an embrace or simply in perfect balance with their printed clones, they function as metaphors for the contemporary place we have sculpted out of alternate realities for ourselves. Yet here they both leave their mark. Their weight is decisive. These sculptures exist in this physical world.
Our life form’s physical impact is crucial also to Argianas’ work. In his series of casts ‘Clay Pressings’ Argianas carves out durations in static matter, pushing matter through time. Did I really just say that? In a complex system of binaries, Argianas casts the rubber negatives of clay surfaces that he gouges out. Using tools with potent personal signifiers such as oyster shells he cups out vacuums creating a devised language based on phonetic codes. Argianas draws out rhythmic sentences in time which can then be read visually: a hieroglyphic of sorts. In one of the series of casts, knots have been tied and pressed through the clay, marking out the vowels in the phrase. They are drawn out in time which in turn is measured through language as it hollows out matter. The oyster shells and rope literally push back space, creating density where formerly there was none. Suddenly from a flat screen, depth is born as if breath itself gave movement and life to an inanimate object (which now you’ll find contains its subject). How can that be?
The duration of the carved inscription implies a new form of measurement, suggesting a time span like a clock’s arms moving round. The text pressed into the clay creates spatial shapes, like oars, displacing water in the sea. Form is shaped empirically, Argianas suggests, as our life’s imprint affects the world around us and our own material form is in turn determined experientially through life. Like a stone smoothed away by the lapping of water or a tree ageing outwards, the passing of time is measured physically through its graphic representation in space. When an oyster dies, another oyster grows out of it, a form gives birth to another and so on and on. Similarly, Argianas’ series of ‘Silkscreens’ are flat surfaces of the same forms delineating space, in repetition. Covered by hazily transparent gauze they implicitly point to the act of seeing – like pixelated surfaces which fold into space, the screens drift between spatial precision and visual hesitancy.
In one of his series of sculpted screens there is a found photograph almost imperceptibly folded in; a black and white image of his mother’s silverware. This slightly blurred image signifies a part of Argianas’ personal mythology, a photograph he took at home as a teenager, the starting point of his exploration of form. This detail reveals an understanding of the fragility of representation as it is born, in the dark room – neither black nor white but somewhere in between. This photograph stands both as an after-thought but also the precursor of what is to come. Its inclusion marks the complexity of Argianas’ game plan, screens become sculptural gestures that once again sketch out their space and time.
Freshly Broken Surfaces, like any good conversation between two people circles around itself, rife with personal signifiers, moments of tension, tactility and just the right amount of distance to keep a clear head.
Can we argue about this? No, please, lets just go to bed.
Freshly Broken Surfaces: Gina Buenfeld
One fine day swimming in the ocean my eye was caught by a harmonious form which stood out amongst the chaos of rocks and stones on the seabed. Having plucked the conch from its resting place I admired its magnificent beauty, its perfect geometry, when, to my horror, the thinly encrusted membrane covering an opening to the spiral chamber lifted up like a trapdoor and a grotesque extrusion of fleshy mass extended itself, menacingly, towards me. I’d taken this shell to be like the ubiquitous treasures in seaside souvenir shops, an inanimate object to be enjoyed for its ornamental qualities, but this revealed a different aspect; that the tongue-like being was the creator of its appendage, extruding matter from its own organs to accommodate its growing mass.
It is a given that man admires nature and echoes its forms in the things he creates. As a mollusk makes with its liver, the human makes through the mind with deliberate intention. One might create an object in the image of a shell, choosing amongst the materials and techniques available to sculpt clay, carve wood, or register surface and volume characteristics with digital technology, translating them into precision-cut layers each emulating a spatial plan of the original. All would attempt and fail to fully resemble the real thing which is the weird reality of a living being whose outer form evidences the duration of its own life.
Humans also have an outer crust that records the events of life: lines and wrinkles that map out facial expressions or sleeping positions; scars that recall past injuries. As natural as this is, the prevailing malaise towards it extends to the habitats we create. Rather than mark the passing of time, and embrace change as a fundamental truth, the deceitful edifices of our urban environments persuade us of an unnatural permanence. It is said city life is death-denying whereas in nature, life and death are immediately apparent. The civilised being knows the world through a man-made frame, one which separates them from the tempo of their own lives. With the exception of municipal trees and the vermin preyed on by the ministry of sanitation, in the city realm, things don’t naturally die and are rarely naturally created.
Is this a false dialectic? Having lauded the conch as a self-created masterpiece, a duality is quickly formed in which that magic is other to ourselves: there is nature; and there is the human. We remake the natural world with our intelligence, explaining its enigmatic ways with science and positing human agency, the ‘man-made’, as a counterpart to the generative force of nature, a partnership responsible for shaping the apparent world. We might not realise this is a false proposition, that everything made in the mind or by the hand of man remains wholly within the realm of nature, as an intelligence whose nature is to create.
There are things we make for utility and there are things we make for art. Art, on the whole, remains faithful to the mystery of life – observing its most perplexing attributes, circumscribing the lacunae in understanding, and dealing with the most disconcerting aspects of human nature including time and loss. The process of making a mould shares a common principle with photography. Both deploy a ‘negative’ impression of something that existed in a particular way at a specific moment with the intention of producing an image of it, whether in two- or three-dimensions. Cast statues are monuments to dead people; photographs are clung to as mementos of moments passed. Both have the effect of the deadened city; the futile attempt to fix an attachment that cannot, or will not, be relinquished. Like the events of our lives that push into us and leave traces in our emotive world or on our skin, it is in the furrowed negative space that we can know the past the best – the wrinkles and scars, the longing for a lost love, or the reverse side of an empty mould. Whatever we fill the space up with it will always remain something other than what we are trying to hold onto. Those crystalised images are artificial abstractions, events extracted from time: they are not time itself nor what we live in the moment. Sometimes the closest things are the most opaque and will remain unknown, as it’s our inadequate view that can estrange us even from ourselves.
To apprehend the meaning and reality of these potent events is to understand the frame through which we experienced them, the libidinal energy we invested them with, through which we might get back to their essence, or to ourselves. Because with imagination the simplest thing can become a whole world as a rock shaped by the journey of a subterranean creature can also be a pathway to feelings and ideas buried in the layers of our individual lives.
