14 Mar 2008 to 19 Apr 2008
Hours : Tuesday - Saturday 10.00 am - 6.00 pm
preview Thursday 13 march 6.00 – 8.00
Anthony Reynolds Gallery
60 Great Marlborough Street
W1
London
United Kingdom
Europe
p: +44 (0) 207 439 2201
m:
f: +44 (0) 207 439 1869
w: www.anthonyreynolds.com
Six stories, strangely moving tales touched with humour, edged with the surreal. Six true stories, narratives of experience from the artist’s life, selected from a period of 40 years. The precision of observation and the almost casual, natural humanity are arresting but, while the narratives themselves are deeply affecting, their form as voice-overs to fixed camera films of the scene of their occurrence has a powerful impact on our perception of location. Background and foreground, setting and story, softly change places as our listening and viewing shift as impulses to imagination.
Two sculptures, close relations. An old, injured wooden clothes horse is helped to maintain its function through the insertion of an elaborate steel ‘crutch’. Meanwhile, the lop-sided beauty of this re-awakened object draws attention and encourages imitation. An attempt is made to refashion its form. Two objects side by side: the first, an imperfect original, healed and restored to dignified purpose; the second, a perfect original disfigured and rendered as an imperfection in homage to the first. Made in its own image. Deus ex machina.
In Toren’s work the most elemental form or mundane object has its very material redeployed to suck out hidden meaning. It’s an alchemical process: a little assistance, a redistribution of resources, is all that is required to reveal the energy and significance contained within dull matter. Object, sign, experience, each and every casually accepted, and more often discarded, mundanity is open to challenge, transformation and adjustment, teasing out truths beyond its basic nature. In this exhibition, short deadpan videos and an old domestic item are revealed as harbingers of formal and fanciful delight.
