calendario eventi  :: 

X

20/4/2005

Simeon Nelson

Elastic Residence, London

Terroir / Boudoir

"The last extreme of littleness is sublime also, because division, as well as addition, is infinite. Infinity fills the mind with that sort of delightful horror which is the truest test of the sublime; and succession and uniformity of parts, which constitute the artificial infinite, give the effect of sublimity in architecture. But in regard to the sublime in building, greatness of dimension is also requisite, though designs which are vast only by their dimensions are always the sign of a common and low imagination. No work of art can be great but as it deceives".
Edmund Burke

A claustrophobic interior forest of Jacobean-fret columns fills the small front room of Elastic Residence. Laser cut from plywood they syncopate the space into a dynamic maze, a flat-packed English Alhambra. They increase in density as you move into the room till it is hard to squeeze through. Dead Birch saplings begin to sprout in between them gradually transforming the back of the room into a forest. A floor to ceiling trellis and chicken wire barrier spans this space and blocks your passage to the rear of the room. Peering through this screen reveals only a thick chiaroscuro tangle of branches and brambles. Tattered shreds of net curtain fringe its perimeter and from beyond it a furtive cracking of twigs can be heard.

This exhibition places highly ornate architectural elements within a 'natural' landscape - or is it the other way round?...this exhibition inverts an unnatural landscape within a small room in a 1770's Georgian house in Whitechapel, East London. This inversion reflects a wider concern in Nelson's practice, a concern with the relationship between notions of the sublime and the personal or the oppositional dualism of nature as variously earthly paradise or dangerous wilderness. It posits 'nature' within the person as much as out there in the world and entangles specifically late Victorian tropes of the evil aesthete with the redemptive wilderness.

Questions of historic authenticity and personal identity, connections between nature and the way it has been constructed in art, the resonant quotient of terror over beauty in the search for a perfect sublime and many others fold into each other in Terroir/Boudoir.

http://www.simeon-nelson.com

To make an appointment please contact Joanna Callaghan on 079 309 1907

Elastic Residence
22 Parfett St E1 1JR - Whitechapel
Open Saturday & Sunday 12-6 or by appointment

stampa

permanent link