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That we might be able to order our thoughts completely is a robotic fantasy, yet people constantly nurture habits which give them a fleeting illusion of control over life. The impossibility of this task is reiterated in any given tragedy or comedy, with us, the audience, baulking at the consequences before returning to our own entrapments of routine.
Given that the intrusion of memory is one of the chief demons which prevents clear and concise thought, it is a surprise that Natalie Billing labels herself 'overly sentimental'. Her exhibition does not evoke the rusty cluttered image of nostalgia. Rather, it appears the artist may have devised a method to kill memories. In the aesthetic vein of Christian Boltanski, Billing makes an architectural mockery of a bureaucratic reference room. Lining the walls with wooden shelling and cardboard boxes, Archive represents a reordering of the artist's personal possessions. In each archive box is an object, wrapped in plastic and labeled with its genesis in the artist's memory. In a way, Billing has executed a self-portrait through her belongings, in a style not dissimilar to that of the Dutch renaissance artist Hans Holbein. The only link between the objects is that all of them have, at some stage, come into the artist's existence. Through the process of sorting, they become 'evened out', practically neutral alongside each other. Each memory is marked, allocated a certain amount of space and made arbitrary. They are accounted for, and therefore not needed. Wrapped in plastic, the insinuation of museum specimens further suggests that a slaying of memory has occurred. If these recollections are not already dead, they have, at best, been made public property.
Where would the