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I was kept waiting under the shelter at a railway station because of a heavy downpour on my way to review PETROL, an exhibition of electronic media installations. The gutters of the shelter were in disrepair and a torrent of rainwater poured from a hole in the drainpipe onto a coloured advertisement sheet lying flat and sodden on the asphalt below. Tiny pieces slowly broke away and a rivulet of blue, red, white and yellow confetti formed and trickled along the length of the platform. The noise of the rainfall on the tin roof combined with the vocalisations of the other commuters, fragmenting and hushing them, rendering them unable to compete. Voices were dissolved, reduced from the initial compensatory shouts to an intermittent babble, long pauses and, eventually, silences. This disintegration, dispersal and transformation passed by and around me, almost unnoticed at first; even my eventual registering of the sound phenomena seemed inconsequential at the time, serving only as a minor and perhaps forgettable distraction in those moments of boredom as I stood waiting, and listening for the train. What I could not have anticipated was the possibility of being able to link this experience with some of the works I was about to experience.
The exhibition, curated by Emile Rasheed, covered three shifts, each of a week's duration. In the first week the works of Ruark Lewis, Dennis Wilcox, Phillip White, Garry Bradbury and Jason Gee were presented. In subsequent weeks, Emile Rasheed's and Simm Steel's were shown. Lewis's and Gee's work was displayed over the three weeks, presumably to provide a thread to the exhibition.
Ruark Lewis's contribution was comprised of newsprint sheets from Le Monde, hung