Pipe dreams in a prone position
Despite the attempts of most galleries to present a clean, modernist, minimalist space to 'set-off' the art they exhibit, there is no real possibility of a pristine art experience. This was most evident in Diane McCarthy's installation-in the little back room upstairs at First Draft West-which offered a self-consciously inhabited 'space inside'.
One experienced a sense of claustrophobia in this room: the objects on the walls seemed to bear down on the viewer and the difficult texture of the foam-covered floor closed in from be low. Additionally, as one was compelled to rotate in this small space in order to view the work, the environment was impossible to grasp in anything but a fragmented vision. But it is the language of fragments with which McCarthy's work deals, the things that inhabit the periphery of our directed vision in our waking hours, or the mise-en-scene of our dreams.
Initially, the acid-yellow foam on the floor had supplied a high-key optical illusion which resonated with the corrugated form of some of the objects. This brought to mind radiated heat, a mirage, like that which shimmers off a 'hot tin roof'. Now, when I visited the show, it bore the marks of passage of the many viewers who had been there before me, providing an interesting accidental addition to the installation-the presence of others had re-contextualised the work in a temporal form which bore out the potency of traces.
The five beautifully crafted tin objects arranged to surround the viewer, appeared to obey uncertain perspectival laws or to have been constructed within a dreamer's mobile logic. The title of the show, Pipe Dreams in a Prone Position, might relate to the objects in