painting in scotland

prince's drawing school trip to lybster, scotland
july 2013

painting attempts
oil paint, varnish, pencil and medium on paper

this is tomorrow review: Ditch Plains

Loretta Fahrenholz: Ditch Plains
Project Native Informant
5 September – 12 October 2013
Review by Kathryn Lloyd

Loretta Fahrenholz is a Berlin-based filmmaker and curator. Her latest film, ‘Ditch Plains’ (currently on show at Project Native Informant), is 31 minutes in length and, at the artist’s request, is screened when a viewer enters the gallery. The gallery itself is far from a white cube space, but instead resembles a claustrophobic, inky black garage. This environment, with its cold stone interior, is perfectly suited to Fahrenholz’s abstruse apocalyptic film.

The exhibition press release begins with an ominous supposition: ‘Something terrible has befallen New York: a natural disaster, a cyber attack, a mass-possession of souls?’ While this is ostensibly vague, the differentiation between these notions becomes redundant as the film progresses; the origin of the terror is unclear and irrelevant. Instead, Fahrenholz investigates the primitive manner in which terror manifests, and its post-hoc representation and subsequent consumption.

Fahrenholz’s opening scenes consciously mirror those now standardised by ‘The Apocalypse Movie’; the dead litter the streets in the guise of those still sleeping; the camera lingers on the significant absence of human presence. Amidst this quiet chaos, dancers Ringmasters Corey, Jay Donn and Marty McFly improvise scenes which suggest digital death matches, stop-and-frisk situations and dictatorial confrontations. They move together, often with clear indications of violence, but they never touch, their bodies always millimetres apart. They are differentiated by neon tubing; some wear it like tribal makeup. The dead are without. This is the closest one gets to classification between two sides; the division of ‘the others’ and ‘us’.

‘Ditch Plains’ employs a voice-over narrative which further subscribes to the disaster movie prototype. However, it often verges on the indecipherable. Snippets of speech rise from a sea of pixelated noise: ‘I want to wake up with a smile on my face and be able to say I love what I do ... Whoever the fuck you are ... I just want to say I love you. I love you and goodbye ... Was it a political act?’ Beyond these fragments, wherever the narrative feels like it is garnering importance, it becomes obfuscated – not overtly, but the words bleed into one another, evading any categorical understanding.

Throughout the film, the dancers’ beautifully choreographed barbarity is inter-spliced with documentary shots of Far Rockaway, depicting the city’s attempt to manage the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Fahrenholz’s blurring of distinction between real-life disaster and abstract terror emphasises the way in which one understands the notion of ‘The Apocalypse’. Through our curious obsession with dystopian fantasies of destruction, ‘The Apocalyptic’ has transcended specificity, and come to exist as an abstract notion ripe for media consumption. The reality of terror is now experienced through a frame provided by Hollywood spectacle.

Set in the night-time streets, hotel hallways and posh apartments of New York, ‘Ditch Plains’ is a knowing and unsettling film. Farhenholz adopts the disaster movie paradigm, but deliberately eschews fundamental elements, forcing attention on the way in which terror is consumed as spectacle before it is acknowledged as reality.

Published on this is tomorrow: this is tomorrow

this is tomorrow review: BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT

Florian Auer: BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT:
Cell Project Space
25 May – 14 July 2013
Review by Kathryn Lloyd 

‘BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT’ is the first UK solo exhibition from Berlin-based artist Florian Auer. In this series of works, commissioned and exhibited by Cell Project Space, Auer continues his investigations into productivity-yielding vocations and their aesthetic tropes. In his previous work, Auer has displayed a deep-seated fascination for post-industrial aesthetics, which stem from the late eighties banking world and the changing environment of business culture. Here, the artist again adopts materials and objects closely associated with consumer desire, and inherent aspiration in the slick, corporate world. 

The gallery space has been lined with an electric blue carpet, and the Cell Project Space office clock has been hijacked and now rests benignly on the gallery wall. While the installation works are contingent upon this office-style encasing created by Auer, they also rally against it; creating a tense dichotomy between work and play. A plastic football is rooted to the floor, with the office clock brooding above it; a red and white punch bag hangs heavily from a chain in the ceiling, resembling a monstrous joint of meat. Two parallel wooden trestles are dusted with chalk, while nearby a suit jacket on a neon coat-hanger shows a post-workout chalky handprint on its pocket. These objects are ones of play; a serious play associated with the driven and ruthless corporate industries. 

Auer’s practice oscillates between technological references and the materiality of hand crafted matter, ease and labour and remorselessness and romance. The exhibition text, written by the artist’s close friend in the financial industry, Maximilian Biswanger, claims that the installations on display “seek to offer an auratic midnight manual for the late hour alchemy inherent to contemporary working settings - in which the bright rather open than close the positions at dusk.” Biswanger’s words, while oblique, soften and idolise an elitist world which is alien to the majority of society. 

The extreme ‘work hard/play hard’ environment which Auer is so intrigued by is one which is often abstracted by the media and represented by its material counterparts: the ‘playboy’ lifestyle, wealth and the objects it accumulates. It is a reality many understand through its luxury items. However, Auer’s perspective appears to come from somewhere else; he stands simultaneously within and without. There is an almost pathetic humaneness to the gym-related objects he displays; a monument to blind and relentless ambition. But there is also an impish, yet critical, humour in his employment of industrial materials such as lead, neon, wood, leather and his references to trade and ticker tape - one of the earliest electronic communication mediums used to circulate stock prices. 

Additionally, the allusions in ‘BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT’ to orthodox working/living performance routines, such as fundamental day/night constructions within the office place, further discussed by Biswanger, give the exhibition a clandestine, sinister atmosphere. There is a general sense of film-noir; the remnants of an indulgent, unrelenting lifestyle littered like clues, left to be discovered in the morning.

Published on this is tomorrow: this is tomorrow