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20/9/2002

Elsewhere

WBD, Berlin

essor

elsewhere

essor gallery is temporarily re-locating to Berlin in September. Since its inaugural exhibition a year ago, the gallery's programme has reflected its working remit: to show a range of established and emerging international artists, many of whom are presenting work to a UK audience for the first time. elsewhere is a natural extension of this ongoing exchange of ideas and an opportunity to bring a selection of artists' work to a new context.

Eiji Watanabe's Traced butterfly series, 2002, reveal a passion for minutiae within illustrations of fauna and flora and a fascination with how humans draw distinctions between nature¹s subspecies. Having cut one of each of the butterflys¹ wings directly out of specialist books, he creates meticulous coloured pencil replicas of their other halves, exploring subtle differences between each specimen and how illustrators have amplified them over the years.

Scott McFarland shares Watanabe's interest in man's need to redefine nature. His photographs of private gardens in and around Vancouver show highly cultivated, manufactured settings as stylised as any 19th century landscape. In the spirit of the earliest photographers, McFarland always aims to convey a sense of the process of photography as a chemical and optic event. His images show his preference for non-spectacular subject matter in favour of subtle image construction and observation.

Anne Daems photographed Untitled (supermarketseries) No.3, 1999, and a number of other 'found still lives' on shopping trips. These bizarre compositions, created as the result of shoppers¹ indecisions, appear just as she discovered them. The pathos of her studies of men drinking after work at a station bar, in Untitled No.6 and Untitled No.7, 2000, is heightened by the overwhelming sense of something preventing them returning home.

In the image: 'Untitled', Anne Daemas, 1999.

Fiorella Rizzo spent two years photographing on the London Underground to create a series of large cibachromes. Teeth and Sculpture, 2000, capture sections of advertising hoardings framed by the doors of tube trains as they stop momentarily in each station. They can be seen as a kind of 21st century urban conceit, captured by Rizzo's camera.

Berlin-based artist Stefan Mauck reconstructs three-dimensional habitats based on how our mind interprets what we see. He has created a new installation for elsewhere, projecting an image onto an object constructed to correlate with, and amplify, elements within the original photograph. As with all of Mauck¹s projected pieces, the image is dematerialised from the object, yet the beam of the projector contains all the information necessary for reconstructing it.

Thomas Ruff continues to develop new bodies of works linked by his fascination with the processes of photography and image manipulation. nudes obe07 and nudes obe02, 2001, are part of a series that draws together most techniques with which he has experimented. Attracted by the poor resolution of their original internet depictions, Ruff subjected these monochrome figures to a digital re-mastering programme, softening their lines, blurring details and removing incidental objects, making the boundaries between the illicit and classical uncertain and allowing the contents to be re-appraised.

Jananne Al-Ani explores the voyeuristic relationship between viewer and subject through a body of photographic and video works. The King's Chamber, 1998, hints at the related tropes in Western painting of the bathing woman and the Orientalist cliché of the odalisque. We watch, through a black frame on a small video monitor, as a woman relaxes while she bathes. Despite exciting the possibility of pleasure, very little happens ­ she reads a magazine, sips wine and stares blankly into space, rises from the bath and departs.

Majida Khattari's works link Western high fashion with more fundamentalist codes of dress and behaviour. At first glance her photographs and watercolour and pencil studies appear to be straightforward fashion sketches. A closer analysis of works such as Maout/Death and Robe verre casse/Broken glass dress shows clothes that are not simply designed to flatter the wearer. These garments are created to conspicuously conceal or reveal parts of their bodies and to hinder or amplify their movement.

Claudia Di Gallo releases cloned human bodies and stylised spheres from the laws of gravity, perpetually suspending them in space in her Flight Paths and Destinations series, 2000. Victoria, 2002, shows the female body reduced to the neon outline of a simple dress ­ a work apron, designed to protect its wearer. The electricity that flows through the drawing exudes a palpable energy. Di Gallo's recent pieces place humans within idealised living and working environments in a fictional cosmos that she has envisaged in detail.

Salim Currimjee has created more intimate imagined worlds in On the road via Deux Soeurs, 2002, and On the road via Brisbane, 2002. He used his architectural training to draw domestic spaces and metropolises which appear logical in their execution but are only possible in two dimensions, or in our minds. Friends (I,L,U,L), 2001, is part of a series of photographs of hand-painted road signs taken on journeys around his native Mauritius. As they rust they are being replaced by printed aluminium signs so these images form part of a slowly disappearing identity for the islands. Karina Bisch prefers urban journeys and actual architectural elements as the premises for her paintings. In the course of her walks and travels she makes studies of buildings' with facades that resemble modernist abstract paintings. The geometry of her faithful copies of their surfaces is, however, undermined as her thick layers of paint dry and run, and fissures or cracks appear on the surface.

Paloma Varga Weisz trained in the traditional craft of woodcarving at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. Her sculptures, installations and drawings convey scenes of uneasy reminiscence as Late Gothic techniques and forms are given contemporary contexts. Their figures, anthropomorphic creatures and symbols seem to come from familiar myths and legends, though none tell a complete story, remaining enigmatic and strangely removed.

elsewhere is open: Monday­Saturday, 11am­6pm
Sundays, 12­6pm

at WBD, Brunennenstrasse 9, Berlin.

It is part of The British Council Berlin and Goethe-Institut London¹s London>Berlin Swap programme. essor gallery hosted Dreiineins, an exhibition of artists from Barbara Wien Galerie, Galerie Wohnmaschine and Kapinos Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, in June 2002.

Scott McFarland will be showing at essor gallery, with Ivan Morley, 6 September­22 November. Paloma Varga Weisz will be exhibited by essor gallery, with Johan Grimonprez, in The Galleries Show, at The Royal Academy, London, 14 September­12 October.

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