Tuesday 29 January 2019

JANE BEAR - February 2019


JANE BEAR 


The Journey (2017-18)



WINDOWSPACE
February 2019



 
 Slippers, (2018)



Suitcases and shoes seem to go hand in hand – there is something nostalgic about each – places travelled, steps taken – that the ‘foot-work’ of Jane Bear should follow the suitcases of Johny Salama is a WINDOWSPACE ‘sequence’ of some interest.

Jane Bear speaks of her ‘shoes’ as ‘slippers’ her word offering a gentility to thoughts of feet and footwear – in the ‘west’ we have the luxury of gradations of comfort, styles, fashions, the indulgence of accumulations, however to this writer there is something achingly poignant about the hollow in the Bear slipper (where the foot goes), that makes of these footwear items something more than mere practical, be they slipper or shoe. Something to do with the art of casting, the unique print of the foot(?) Then the yeti comes to mind, the footfall in snow, the trace, the shape, the mark-making, the leaving behind. Mud follows snow.

Undoubtedly as Bear presents these slippers they form a family of some kind, one she sees as a progression, something orderly, rather not the unruly of family, instead the positive of progress, from young to old or vice-versa. She states:
Travelling the journey through various stages of life from our first steps to the arrival at our final destination slippers represent the different phases of life punctuated with events and circumstances, most of which cannot be foretold.  Each pair inviting the viewer to contemplate each different stage of life’s journey.

Whether progress, progression, or retreat to simpler (better?) times when shapes of functional items were lovingly molded by hand, unique as any artwork, as these slippers are, the sense of something else remains – haunting, beyond the ‘mere’ functional. Is it art?

Where and who offers shoes as art – Paris and Paris, Milan, Milan – how to decipher the collusion of art and fashion that fuel the indulgent churn that is ‘high’ this and that. Is there a ‘message’ somewhere?




If the Dutch can make wooden shoes so Turkish-Cypriot Hussein Chalayan can make wooden skirts. It was 2000 – a very tricky year by any estimation:
“I feared things going wrong, but the risk was so worth taking," said … Chalayan shortly after his A/W00 show. If anything qualifies as a risk, it’s transforming a piece of furniture made from wood into a piece of clothing … in front of a live audience … Chalayan did at London Fashion Week in February 2000: he transformed four chair covers and a coffee table into four dresses and a wooden skirt.
Drawing on themes as disparate as architecture, aerodynamics, space and religion, Chalayan has earned a reputation for being London’s cerebral designer, marked by his unique talent for combining philosophical ideals with wearable clothes.
On a stage that resembled a living room – complete with four chairs, a table, a flat screen television, several vases and pots – the designer presented his collection … This show bordered on a 1970s "happening": four models wearing grey shift-dresses approached these chairs, removed the covers and then put them onto their bodies. The last model wearing a similar dress delicately stepped into the middle of the table, lifted it up and transformed it into a skirt.
This wasn’t, however, an exercise in theatricality for the sake of theatricality …
The show was inspired by refugees of war, people forced to flee their homes, carrying their worldly possessions on’ their backs. Given the designer’s Turkish Cypriot heritage and the conflict that occurred in that area during the 60s and 70s, this inspiration has a particularly personal resonance …’

And then there was Manolo Blahnik – whose parents thought he should be a diplomat, who enrolled for law and politics, and graduated in architecture and literature then moved to Paris to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts and Stage Set Design at the Louvre Art School … 2000, Blahnik, who had learnt shoe-making from his mother … launched a virtual reality online show room featuring 3D models of his shoes … his entire collection was sold in a few weeks.

oOo

Bear talking to her last installation at WINDOWSPACE 2017


It is this wider world stage that this writer detects behind Bear’s ‘slippers’ – the alchemy of materials, an understanding of the import of material quintessence on a journey … a journey, or a progression, that asks the viewer to think beyond the apparently mundane act of one foot placed beyond another, though such steadfast tread is what moves the world and the person on the human quest for safety, knowledge, warmth, humanity. Bear’s work moves us on a journey of material appreciation, of asking ‘how’ of fundamental materials, shapes and purposes, while hinting at the haunting urges and absences that make art.

AS

Another 'progression' - 
'pots' of felt made by workshop participants under Bear's guidance, 2017







Friday 4 January 2019

JOHNNY SALAMEH - January 2019




JOHNY SALAMA


The Dictator (2018)



WINDOWSPACE 
January 2019



Johny Salama, The Dictator, (2018)


The suitcase is a curiously emotive object. It may contain belongings but possibly also memories, and their trace, wisps of previous ‘excursions’: a little sand, a stray thread, an out of date ticket, a foreign coin.

Traffic, (2002), a poignant work by Mona Hatoum, held by the Art Gallery of South Australia, consists only of two dull-coloured mid-sized well-travelled suitcases. The cases are joined, like Siamese twins, by a hank of dark hair. Hair is often an element one finds in a suitcase – it could be yours or an Other’s.

Mona Hatoum, Traffic, (2002)


When I first saw Johny Salama’s work The Dictator, (2018), I immediately sensed the fragility of the traveller: all those cases – which is mine? is it at the bottom or the top of the pile? And what of the chair at the apex? Who could it be who might be perilously positioned atop this pile of travel ware, this accumulated responsibility – I imagined someone moving their life, their family, to another land and guarding what little they were carrying, someone looking out at the world from a place of insecure momentum.

This interpretation was not that of the artist – Salama informed me that I was looking at the chair of a dictator (and yes I should have studied the chair more closely, it was finely wrought, elegant, not an itinerant’s style at all). It was the chair of someone who sat carelessly above the miserable momentum below, someone who sat insensitively on the lives of others.

Salama is Syrian, he understands momentum, dislocation, chaos, indeed hell enforced by dictators. The suitcase is a very poignant symbol indeed.


AS