The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
"Of course it's terribly fashionable these days to be stuck in between, to be wounded with desire, to be longing for some lost or imagined home ... / have made claims on all of these poses. But they are also very real. "
Simryn Gill, artist slatement for Here Not There.
Read these as fragments of auto-biography: Tiny broken shard~ of coloured glass strewn diagonally across the concrete floor. Framed: the white walls of a Contemporary Art Space. Authoritative. Sanctioned space. In here, Simryn Gill's installation appeared almost as an afterthought. As though someone had tipped out the remnants of spent lives from elsewhere. The glass was no longer even sharp. Something- the sea perhaps-seemed to have gradually eroded the potential of these slivers to wound. The pitted surface of the eroded glass pieces made reflection impossible. The previous lives of these fragments had been smashed and eroded by time and context.
These pieces, individually, and as a whole, fascinated. Tiny and jewel-like, they brought gallery visitors down to floor level, as they stooped to read the carefully inscribed words that had been etched into the surface of each.
Together, the words made no coherent sense. Arranged like a crescent-shaped high-tide drift, they appeared to have been washed ashore by a mute sea. A transparent residue of a forgotten poetry.
Read this as reflection:
As Simryn Gill points out, when one's hesitant searches or enquiries are labelled and assimilated by the art world, it becomes more difficult to determine the "poses" from the 'real '. The lip-service being paid at present to hybrid cultural experiences is defined by Gill as "fashionable". Nevertheless, the works of a number of the