Ruark Lewis: An Index of Kindness
In the latest installation from Ruark Lewis, a variety of candy striped objects are arranged on the floor of Surry Hills’s Chalk Horse Gallery, interspersed with other quasi-sculptural painted and tactile curios. They texture the space with a somewhat festive air. In a corner is a wooden mallet, upturned, reinvented by contrasting stripes; against one wall is a baseless globe, spanned by a brass meridian and striped as if in a blur of spin; in the middle of the gallery a fifteen inch ball of red wool supports one end of a black and white piece of timber. The ball suggests a metaphorical centrality, hinting at the delicacy with which things hold their shape and at various forms of consolidation and unraveling.
The central thematic of the show, though, is found in the pieces which hang from the ceiling and line the walls, fabric printed with blocks of text: black and red flags inscribed with combinations of aphorisms and individual letters. The aphoristic writing is from the Russian-born novelist Nathalie Sarraute, with whom Lewis collaborated on the book Just for Nothing (1997). That they are flags, or banners, is a significant gesture to the political undertones of this exhibition: flags mark identity, banners signify protest, and a portion of the work was constructed in Singapore, where the painting of any political slogan can lead to jail. This political edge is grounded by a red transcription hanging at the entry, originating from the Indian intellectual Ashis Nandy. Nandy has written extensively on the evaporation of ethical and cultural values in regions of Southern Asia, but here his words are arranged in a semantically open-ended poetic: IT/WAS A/STRANGE MIX/OF LOVE AND HATE/AFFIRMATIONS