Manfred Pernice: «anexos»LOCAL
The Modern Institute, Glasgow
6 July - 24 August 2013
Review by Catrin Davies
There’s something about the seemingly ad hoc way that the disparate parts of Manfred Pernice’s work are placed (not scattered) at The Modern Institute’s Osborne Street gallery that makes this arrangement of dismantled and displaced “vessels” feel strangely neat and organised.
As it transpires, Pernice’s interest happens to be in a very specific kind, and method, of controlling and categorising. He sees buildings and vessels as containers - a physical means of controlling and amassing - appeasing society’s need to put everything in a box’Here, Pernice relishes pulling these boxes apart, breaking down the barriers between internal and external and dismantling their definitions. Albeit in a fairly orderly fashion.
Pernice works with post-industrial debris - everyday building ephemera which have been constructed then deconstructed to be placed in a plaintively specific composition. On the gallery floor lie three “cassettes”, inside or on top of which are a number of objects which are left to the viewer to define as useful keepers, or impractical waste. Lining up against one wall are a series of boxes, hurriedly painted in bold pops of red. Propped against another is a something which resembles an oversized guitar pick. If it all feels slightly opaque and disconnected, then look to the gallery walls where Pernice’s collage works help to connect the dots between the work installed on the floor and his thought process. The sparingly layered texts, magazine tears and newspaper clippings fill in the gaps, some revealing snippets from Spanish newspapers from which the title of the exhibition is taken; Pernice was interested in coverage in the Spanish press regarding demolition and waste separation.
If you’re left with the feeling that the processes of disposal and filtering, of transient use, separation and containment is all really quite ephemeral, even confusing, and widely open to interpretation, then Pernice has probably achieved what he set out to.
