Nomadic curatorial project, Emalin is presenting the If in Ones Own Time group exhibition in Naples, opening July 10 and running to July 17.
Taking the form of an show that incorporates an event programme based around San Giuseppe delle Scalze, a church in the centre of Naples, some of the invited artists will give talks, tours, guides, and screen videos that relate to the overarching notion outlined in the press release that “the new begins in observations of the old”.
Included are works: ‘A walk with Antirrhinum majus’, a performance by Augustas Serapinas on the discovery of the wildflowers of San Giuseppe delle Scalze; a tour through the architecture of the Sanità district guided by Fabrizio Ballabio of artist collective, åyr; a library by BeckBooks and other contributions from several more artists including Rob Chavasse, Isabel Lewis, Hannah WeinbergerandMaria Loboda.
Emalin have previously curated large group show Folly, that occupied an old stone building in Scotland known as the Dunmore Pineapple after the fruit it mimics, and the intimate installation, Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise in 2014 in a London hotel by London-based artist Athena Papadopoulos.
New York-based artist Jeong’s show consists a sculptural installation in the form of a ‘suspended maze’ made from moulds of captured tears and sugar called Lash Blast x 2% Flourish. Its press announcement comes accompanied by an abstract, poetic text skirting a theme of affect in objects: “knockoff ysl cries, detained by customs, begging for clearance.”
London-based Chavasse is showing a single-channel projection called The doldroms, a video constructed from phone footage and situated in a region of the Atlantic Ocean called ‘the Doldrums’ known for its unpredictable weather, as well as a word that refers to a state of malaise and stagnation.
Using simple technological innovations to intervene in physical spaces and objects, Chavasse’s work alters perceptions of space and plays with underlying questions of phenomenology, transfiguring the physical in ways that make us questions physicality in and of itself.
In a recent exhibition at titled The Centre of the Earth is Molten History at Rod Barton, for example, Chavasse transformed the gallery space into a “post-rendered reality” using Computational Fluid Dynamics software that depicts the effects of wind erosion on a renowned sculpture over extended periods of time.
His wallpaper for Desktop Residency, though entirely digital, performs a similar function, marrying photography with digital manipulation to create works that question the boundaries of our perception and reality.
An unnerving hiss of wind blows through the entrance to Off Season, UK multi-media artist Rob Chavasse’s latest show at The Sunday Painter. Titled ‘Séance’, this tuned field recording sets the scene for the rest of the exhibition. Played out on two speakers, in a room of its own, at the top of a stairwell, it bleeds our ears before our eyes. The senses are locked onto an abstraction in the air, before being allowed a view of the visual.
Each of Chavasse’s works play on this initial reflex in one way or another. Upstairs within the main white walled room, altered to work as part of the exhibition display, an unusual readymade is found in the form of a radiator. Its heat wave, like ‘Séance’’s sound wave, points in the direction of forces beyond our visual perception, emanating between and beyond the walls.
Installed above it, a large, black piece titled ‘S.A.D’ brings these convection currents in contact with the material. Produced using a scanner left outdoors the lambda print is an optical recording of speckled rainfall patterns, their movement and the glitches created as the scanning device began to crash. A digital work, about natural forces, that inverts drops of water into fragmented white space, only to be brought back to life by the light of day.
In a sense ‘S.A.D’ is activated by the sunlight, the radiator and each of the surrounding works also play against each other’s darker, optimistic or even neutral sides. However you choose to see it, the beauty is in where you choose to stand and where you let your imagination take you. At first glance ‘Kola cube Cola,’ a screen print positioned opposite ‘S.A.D,’ might appear to reflect on its opposite number, built out of a mirror with cloud-like patterns on its surface.
As its title suggests, though, Chavasse is having fun with the idea that a sweet reproduces an already synthetic tasting fizzy beverage. And what surprises further is that at just the right angle you can catch a glimpse of a figure in the reverse of the screen print, based on an image from the film Yeti: Curse of The Snow Demon. Perhaps, it is in itself the idea of what we see up in clouds being subjective reverie but nevertheless representing a very real fear of something out there that cannot be grasped.
Brilliantly, ‘Disco not Disco’ continues this surprise element, presenting in its elongated rectangular shape and apparent abstract expressionist style, what seems to be an homage to Jackson Pollock but is in fact the dirty wastage of a night club crowd presented on calico. It’s a documentation of a very certain type of energy laced with glitter raised to the status of art.
There’s much more, of course. ‘Cowboy Casino’ documents an urban intervention monumentalising the architect Eliott Noyes‘ now derelict petrol stations and ‘Not too clever emoticon’ forges the minimalism of Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square with its readymade function as a Warmwave Fenix GR900 glass panel heater. It’s here that Chavasse hints most explicitly to the Marshall Berman essay examining modernisation and its conflicting relationship with modernism, as well the shared belief that “all that is solid melts into air”.
Rob Chavasse’s OFF SEASON is on at The Sunday Painter, London and runs from February 22 to March 17, 2013.