'Wonderland'; 'Face'; 'Every gesture has a sound (every sound has a gesture)'
Questions have lingered with me since viewing Eleanor Avery’s ‘Wonderland’, Britt Knudsen-Owens’ ‘Face’ and Caitlin Reid’s ‘Every gesture has a sound, (Every sound has a gesture)’ at Soapbox Gallery. What was it that linked these three very different exhibitions? What was it that made them collectively so haunting?
In viewing the exhibitions, one came upon each artist’s work as if being witness to an event that has just occurred. In Avery’s ‘Wonderland’ what has just occurred is an accident. A tree in which a small plasticine house was situated has just been completely uprooted and fallen across the space of the onlooker, irreparably damaging and scattering the makings of the little house. Was it pushed or did it fall by chance? Juliana Engberg, in writing about the exhibition ‘A History of Happiness’ reminds us that we know from Freud that falling is both pleasurable and filled with anxiety.1 Falling can recall the childhood games when a caring adult always caught us. However as Engberg notes ‘in dreams as in life… we remove the hands of waiting adults and find ourselves free-falling, uncertain of our fate.’2 The child/adult’s leap out of the known is the event that has just occurred. We are ecstatic and fearful. We are traumatised. Did being here, make this happen?
Knudsen-Owen’s ‘Face’ creates a corridor through which we pass. On one side a large cloth, perhaps bed linen, has been ripped to shreds in either play or anger. Then, with possible regret, it has been madly restitched to create a wall of shreds surging to the floor, redeemed through imagination. On the opposite side of the room the adult has emerged to stitch the now