The Agency is pleased to present the British artist Sadie Murdoch with new photographs and works on paper. The Modernist movement and its re-evaluation from a contemporary point of view has always been a source of inspiration and a challenge to her artistic production.
Her most recent works loosely focuses on theatrical productions and design from the era of Constructivism and Suprematism. In re-working the sources from a contemporary viewpoint Murdoch re- mixes the era’s narratives and performance elements with the aesthetics of stage and poster design with the result of creating a series of abstracted photographs and drawings.
Her photographs interpret and elaborate actual set designs and costumes, with the intent of re-creating from 'memory', the elaborate and geometrical constructions of artists such as Malevich and El Lissitzky, and yet they take on their own life as they play with multiple refractions of light, positive-negative reversal and anachronistic insertions such as the watercolour of Josephine Baker’s costume Electric Fairy. It is the irreverent quotation, which imbues Murdoch’s work with a life of its own. Whereas the metallic colours in modernist stage and costume design are muted, in her work they appear like liquid metal. The silver metallicised surfaces, with their multiple reflections; fragmentations and distortions create an abstraction, which collapses any distinction between 'modernism' and 'postmodernism'. The reflective geometry accommodates languages as historically distant as that of Oscar Schlemmer and Ridley Scott.
The eternal battle of man versus machine and nature versus artifice is of current relevance as much as it was during Modernism. What makes Murdoch’s work intriguing is that it is transposed into a dialogue between painting and photographic abstraction. Whilst painterly abstraction is commonplace, photographic abstraction, which does not reference science, is uncommon. Sadie Murdoch’s series of works traverses from the canon of painterly abstraction into photographic painting. She creates figurative and design inspired environments, which, through the process of photography, take on new abstract meanings through reflections, distortions, reversed colour and mirror effects. The results are not the clean lines of Suprematist art but an emotive and personalised play of primary colours in multiple refractions.
Murdoch’s re-cycling process of modernist imagery and principles whilst remaining utterly contemporary has now reached a point, where it embraces the irreverence and eclecticism of modernism via a highly iconoclastic process. In this exhibition references to Malevich's Victory over the Sun, Oscar Schlemmer and the distinctly human and delicately drawn Josephine Baker sit neatly together unfolding in a spectacle of multiple reflection and colours. Artifice and naturalism, abstraction and figuration, reproduction and the unique, amalgamate into a spirited and bold new series of works.
S.T.O.R.A.G.E RICEBOY SLEEPS 11 April – 17 May 08
The Agency is pleased to present Riceboy Sleeps, with a recent body of work. Riceboy Sleeps are the two Iceland based artists Alex Somers and Jon Thor Birgissen, jointly authoring works on paper as we well as video works and soundscapes.
Riceboy work from found objects, this is done both in reference to Icelandic rooting as well as Beuysian aesthetics. It is fair to say that Riceboy’s work begins with the written word, in old books specifically. Yet it is not the contents of the books but their visual appearance, their markings and traces of being used, which lead on to their drawings being layered on top of the worn pages. The drawings in turn are photographed and inserted in old window frames, withered from the elements with their layers of chipped paint and the drips of old paint and dust on the glass exposed.The result of this process are poetic slight-handed drawings of boyhood memories traced on the remnants of quite literally a house. The work speaks of innocence and an intact world order, with time passing over the memory in changing seasons. The objects speak of beauty. One could leave it at that as the works are in many ways simply enchanting.
Riceboy construct their works from multiple sources and multiple meanings. They belie the simplicity of the result. The meanings are meticulously unearthed akin to an archealogical dig, the delapidation of the book pages is given a new meaning by the addition of the drawings, which in turn function like a graffiti scrawl. The drawings grow out of stains in the book, their fast and unfinished strokes are not authored by one but two artists, we do not find out which. Other markings appear, notes, unfinished words, numbers. We do not find out who added them and when. They give the torn pages new meanings. But rather than being complete messages they are encrypted, made sometime in the past or recently, like the dust gathered on the windowframes they shift, transmute form other markings. The objects become performative, or in contemporary terms like animations.
Riceboy Sleeps are a collective of two artists and by default,as found object are used, by other unnamed authors, who all contribute to the works. They are symbols of collective memory or rather representations of snippets of memory. By turning the drawings and notes on book pages into a photograph, the first part of the work is fixed at some point, yet when being inserted into the windowframes with their markings and stains the process begins again to the point where the works become open-ended ciphers.
Riceboy’s videos function along the same collage technique of piecing together found super8 footage, allowing for the flickering of spliced filmtape to form new marks or rhythmic incisions which in turn are overlayed with sound elements to form dreamlike sequences. The sound here is incidental as it becomes another mark made over someone else’s memory.
The complete absence of subjectivity is “ a little Piece of the Real” in the sense of Slavoij Zizek, whereby the stain becomes the subject itself. Riceboy Sleeps works emerge from post-modern thinking by offering endless possibilities of interpretation, allowing for the collective unconscious to become part of the continuing ritual of reading and re-reading the marks.
