8 June — 9 August 2012
12-5pm daily

An exhibition of newly commissioned and existing work that looks at the idea of architecture as an expanded personal archive and a depository for memories.  Part of the national Love Architecture Festival in June, it includes talks and events looking at the space between art and architecture. 

This exhibition of newly commissioned and existing work explores the notion that a building can act as an expanded personal archive and a depository for memories. A range of sculpture, drawing and video, work with, or reference, the connection between architectural space, memory and experience. Throughout the exhibition a number of events brought artists and experts together to discuss the relationship between art and architecture - listen to these events here.

Jackie Chettur currently works with text, photography and performance to uncover the ways that we imagine and remember spaces. For Recollect she presents new work exploring the physical space of the house as a metaphor for the emotionally claustrophobic relationships in the book Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. By selecting sections of text and printing them as new titles on collectable editions of the book, Chettur reframes this widely-read book. A stereoscope gives the trompe l’oeil image of the porch of the Frome house, a mundane space that becomes pivotal as the narrative unfolds. Both pieces use old technologies (stereoscopes and the printing press) to present a contemporary reading of the text, written in 1911. 

Jackie Chettur also has a studio at Wysing, click here for more information

Phil Coy presents his work Façade; for the first time shown as part of the set for the film of the same name. As the title suggests, the work looks at the construction of reality and the deconstruction of built space and language. By showing the mechanisms of television: the make-up room, the studio, the green screen and the auto-cue, Coy demonstrates how even simple experiences are layered with visual and technical tricks. He uses archival footage and the language of architectural ‘walk-throughs’ to explore some aspects of contemporary architecture, including the connotations of power associated with the use of glass in corporate architecture. Working with a production film crew and architectural visualisation specialists Miller Hare, Façade's production process implements the tools and hierarchical systems associated with corporate media production in order to reveal the constituent parts of that system. The film’s narrator, television presenter Julia Somerville, repeats the word façade and gives its definition, adding a layer of irony to the way that the film builds up and breaks down the appearances of its characters.

 

Three sculptures from the series Abandon in Place, and a film, Analytical Chronology of Three Dimensions are the work of Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry (who were also resident at Wysing during The Department of Overlooked Histories, 2011). The upper sections of the sculptures, are based on John Madin’s Central Library, Birmingham, and the lower parts based on the Apollo 1 launch pad, which remains as a monument to the astronauts who died in the shuttle in Cape Canaveral. Each of these two elements contains one meteorite which is visible in the surface of the concrete.  Through representing the Central Library, a condemned Brutalist building from 1972, Kihlberg and Henry play with the architectural model as a sculpture of a finished and flawed building rather than a proposition for something new. The concrete forms seem to represent the storage of static information at odds with the fluid way in which we visualize the consumption of knowledge with new technology.

The film Analytical Chronology of Three Dimensions is an experiment in developing a visual or cinematic grammar based on the temporal/spatial properties of lingual grammar. A series of tenses applied to simple verbs are expressed in relation to various types of space; the abstract mathematical space expressed in the book Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, the physical space of a gallery building, its architectural maquette, and the projected space of the video itself within that space. This layering of perspectives demonstrates the fluidity with which we experience seemingly static spaces.

 

The video 4.5 ft. and to the left, behind me by Una Knox is projected onto the back wall of the gallery. This piece follows a man, Steve Woodhouse, on a physical journey around the corridors and storage rooms of a London museum storage facility as he describes his work managing the images of the museum collection and his experience of a medical condition known as ‘temporal lobe epilepsy’ where déjà vu precedes epileptic seizures. As he moves through it, the building becomes a metaphor for the man’s mind with its empty corridors, storage boxes full of unseen objects and large clock-face seen from the inside. The narrator describes unusual experiences or bizarre sensations, raising questions about reality and perception. This thematic is further explored by the way that Woodhouse, who also works as a professional actor, discusses the duality of actor versus acted persona whilst effectively ‘playing’ himself in Knox’s video.

The group Better Futures Forever responded to the exhibition by curating their own show, with the work of five artists, in Wysing’s gallery before Recollect was installed. In editing these images, certain elements of Wysing’s gallery have been amended or improved, raising questions about how memories of real space and activity are fixed and manipulated. By co-opting a public space for private use and allowing access to this act only through mediated images the group play with tensions between public and private space.

Two prints by Sean Edwards made as part of a residency in the Maelfa Shopping Centre, Llanedeyrn, are included in the exhibition. The Maelfa, once a busy shopping centre situated on the outskirts of Cardiff where the artist grew up, was due to be demolished when Edwards took up residence to record the space in an act that sits between personal recollection, nostalgia and documentation. The care taken over documenting this seemingly failed public space speaks of the importance of personal memories and insights in spaces controlled by public planning. Focusing on small moments in the fabric of this large architectural setting Edwards makes intimate yet abstract images that could describe spaces familiar to many people. Despite the architectural scale of the prints, they are pasted onto the wall in a low-fi manner that suits the un-monumental imagery they convey.

Rosie Pedlow and Joe King exhibit Bivouac, a large sculpture and a carousel of 80 photographic slides. The slides show structures made from organic materials that frequently and anonymously sprang up over the course of a year in an area of Suffolk woodland surrounding the artists. Pedlow and King began to record this process that seemed to sit between human construction and organic patterns and subsequently ‘abducted’ one of the dens. Encountering the structures only as traces the artists associated them with the mysterious, potentially mischievous activity of sprites or ethereal characters. The spaces represent the construction of informal architectures built as and used for play.
A programme of events will run as part of the exhibition.

Works in Recollect could be purchased through Own Art, the interest-free loan scheme.  Wysing Members, Supporters and Patrons can enjoy a 10% discount on purchase price.