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29/5/2002

Mapping the process

Essor Gallery, London

This exhibition maps the ideas and individual territories of eighteen artists. Highly diverse in their approaches and aspirations, each exposes their raw working methodologies through the immediacy of these pieces. The works exist somewhere between initial concept and possible resolution and can be read as notations, studies or explorations. Together they provide blueprints for the interpretation of a range of artistic practices, analysing and revealing motivations and traces of thought.

The works of Dan Graham, Stefan Mauck, Gary Woodley and Salim Currimjee focus on the language and consequences of architecture. Gary Woodley literally maps out the building. Using luminescent strips he traces the lines of the gallerys entrance area, focusing attention on the edges of the space and the way we separate the interior and exterior. Dan Graham creates conceptual buildings, making proposals for new ways of living, eating and even swimming. In this exhibition his working process is traced from rough initial drawings through to cardboard maquettes and architectural models in metal and glass. Swimming Pool/Fish Pond is a yet unrealised model for a pool whose space is divided between swimming area, fish pond and café. Two-way mirrors surround the cylindrical sides of the pool giving anamorphically distorted views to the swimmers of their own bodies, while viewers in the café see people and fish underwater. Stefan Maucks drawings analyse domestic architecture in Germany. Acknowledging Dan Grahams influential Homes for America series he combines text with imagery to make a study of how standard houses are designed, and how they function for their inhabitants. Maucks layered drawings suggest that the things we see are filtered by sociological components and personal experiences. Salim Currimjee uses his architectural training to make imaginary drawings of building design and motifs. These projects appear very logical in their execution but they are only possible in two dimensions, or in our minds.

Imaginary beasts, plants and hybrids populate the works of Paul McCarthy, Sigmar Polke, Paul Morrison and Johannes Brus. Paul McCarthys central themes are the myths and stereotypes of American popular culture and the effect the media and consumerism have on the unconscious. The drawings and texts in Drift, Paul & Ben, and OH FFF are part of an ongoing collaboration with Benjamin Weissman and were created in preparation for a 24-foot sculpture of copulating elves and mammoths. Sigmar Polkes work revels in being a parody of modernist art and popular culture. His Beer mat fountain and figural doodles, reflect a freewheeling and nihilistic approach to concepts of high art and low culture. Paul Morrison brings magical realism to monochromatic paintings. Combining cartoon images with silhouettes from botanical reference books he creates distinctive black and white worlds. For this exhibition he is showing drawings of towering dandelions as they might appear to a child in a dreamy sleep on the grass. They function as scaled down studies, which provide directions for his wall paintings. Johannes Brus photographs totemic figures such as the horse, the eagle and Egyptian animal gods, endowing them with all their mythical power, while using the development process to strip away the identities we have constructed for them.

Sue Arrowsmith, Claude Heath and Tim Knowles combine art with science, harnessing the forces of change to trace movement as it occurs in the natural world. Sue Arrowsmith uses the possibilities of the drawn line as the basis for her frequently painstaking and time-consuming work. Deliberately choosing traditional media of ink and canvas, she traces the delicate forms of raindrops as they land on her studio window. Claude Heath has made four drawings mounted on lightboxes of the spray from a Fountain, working from different angles to record how the water moves, as if he were making a technical investigation. Attempting to give a solid shape to something intangible and inconstant, Heaths work allows the minds eye to play with the possibilities of volume and gravity. The photographic prints of Tim Knowles capture the elegant patterns of insects in flight. Their erratic paths and wing movements are left as a ghostly flame or fern-like trail of orange light recorded onto the negative. Different insects, with their various forms and types of flight, leave distinctive trails, which produce surprisingly beautiful and ephemeral images.

Anne Daems, Majida Khattari, Susan Hefuna and Monica Bonvicini focus on stereotypes and how they affect our conscience and memory. Anne Daems drawings recall visual details the tiny things that stand our in our minds as defining a certain person or moment. Her brief narrative texts pin them to a specific memory. They work as fragmentary momento mori reminding us of the myriad details and emotions that we continually experience, and what little information we need to recall them. Majida Khattaris works link Western high fashion with more fundamentalist codes of dress and behaviour. At first glance they appear to be straightforward fashion sketches. A closer analysis shows clothes that are not simply designed to flatter the wearer. These garments are created to restrict movement and conspicuously conceal or reveal parts of the body. Susan Hefunas graphic work is connected with the specific cultural references which exist between North African and European social structures, her many layered works can be seen to refer to the veiled screens which keep women behind traditional Egyptian windows, or to the screens in confessional boxes separating priest and supplicant. The challenged stereotype in Monica Bonvicinis work is the domestic goddess, and her drawings explore the relationship between gender and architectural space. Bonvicini uses the rhetoric of feminism in Smart Quotations a series of witty ink phrases scrawled over pencil drawings to undermine clichés of sexism in Western culture.

Edward Allington, Markus Vater and Wolfgang Stehle integrate the equipment and concepts of office life into their work. Edward Allington uses paper taken from handwritten ledger books for his drawings. Desirable objects, reminiscent of components of Classical architecture, float in interiors against a background of archaic profit and loss information. Making the invisible subcurrents of society visible, Allingtons drawings suggest deep desires, which we can only hope to realise. He originally sourced the objects in Sieve, Strain, Sort and X from encyclopaedia images of manufacturing techniques and sees them as representing Opotential actions, as things that can be made. Markus Vaters drawings will be churned out from a fax machine for the duration of the exhibition, exploring ideas about architecture in a dark mock-horror cartoon style.

Essor Gallery 1 America Street London SE1 ONE
Monday - Friday 9am - 6 pm Saturday 10am - 5pm

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