THE HIGH LOW SHOW

THE HIGH LOW SHOW

 
Bronwen Buckeridge - Susan Collis - Sara Haq - Kate MccGwire - Tom Lovelace - Sarah Roberts - Julie Verhoeven

Curated by Paul Carey-Kent

Laure Genillard Gallery, 2 Hanway Place- near Tottenham Court Road tube

Wednesday - Saturday, 1-6pm

 6 May - 24 June 2017 

Late opening with artists' talks: Thursday 25 May, 6pm - 8pm (see end for summaries)

The High Low Show is a site-responsive adventure in contrasts and connections. Each of seven artists have work upstairs and downstairs in Laure Genillard's distinctively divided space. Each artist's works will operate between registers of high and low, including altitude, viewpoint, mood, value and cultural register. Other relationships emerge across the 'total up' and 'total down', generating many routes around a multimedia how featuring Bronwen Buckeridge, Susan Collis, Sara Haq, Tom Lovelace, Kate MccGwire, Sarah Roberts and Julie Verhoeven.

              

Bronwen Buckeridge’s experience as a producer feeds into her binaural sound installations. Here she generates stimulating discrepancies between what we see and hear: upstairs, in Site Sampling, an optician tells us where to look, only to direct our gazes – in the absence of eye charts – to the street activity we might have overlooked. The other sounds, though, come from recordings of the scene by night. Downstairs, in Sounding Periscope (situation s), we hear bats – emerging from a cave, perhaps – but also the live sound outside, now captured from a point rendered confusingly high by the use of a weather balloon.

Susan Collis sets up confusions which undermine our conventional bases for ascribing value. Was that dust sheet left behind in error as the show was installed? No, the carelessly splashed paint on Any paradise can trudge here is actually scrupulously embroidered: what seemed accidental stemmed from slow, deliberate, skilled labour. Upstairs, the utility socket on the floor is raised up, this time physically and presentationally as well as through the attention paid to it: the frottaged form is placed on a plinth. That, moreover, hides the original of Understudy and invests it with the value and allure of an item worthy of secretion.

Sara Haq has known precarious times –  recently suffering periods of  ill health and homelessness – but, as the gentle self-mockery of the series title Quantum of Solace indicates, she maintains a spirited delicacy and wit.  Haq punctuates the show, building shifting perspectives of both high and low into each of her photograph, chipboard and object combinations: clouds, feathers and leaves share common space with fallen trees, roots and mud.  Being short, says Haq, it’s a nice change to have people looking up as well as down! There is, she implies, the potential to move through every problem.  Inner resourcefulness is connected to nature: there is a seed.

 

Kate MccGwire is known for the fantastical sculptures she makes from quantities of feathers which it’s already an achievement to source.   They come from the high place of flight, but the lichen-like growth of Host and the coiled, unsettling sensuality of Sentient are shot through with ambiguity and darkness – even though the latter affects the purity of white as it writhes inside its glass mausoleum. Perhaps it isn’t quite the descent it seems to the Vermiculus series of  life drawings created by graphite-loaded maggots crawling across a paper surface. 

Tom Lovelace, though a photographer, does not foreground the camera here. Upstairs, what could be mistaken for a painterly riff on Rothko is actually a photogram on fabric.  Lovelace found the three sheets layered here attached to a theatre in Italy, where the presence of posters had been recorded by the sun in a multi-year ‘exposure’.   Jim, named for a similarly long-serving steelworker, combines a utilitarian air vent (which could be part of the gallery’s architecture) with an illuminated image of a parhelion* so pointing up from the industrial towards, if not transcendence, then The last Sun from Spoleto.

Sarah Roberts’ O Buoy - From Buoy stands the surface of a swimming pool on its side, rendering its earnest division into lanes rather futile. Downstairs we are immersed in its boxed, rolled and stacked depths, complete with invented perfume. You can treat Partial Plastic Oasis as an image, or walk in: either way form is collapsed into an anthology of surfaces.  The 'original' casino pool and spa were in Reno: their plastic landscapes carry an artificiality suited to enforced 'relaxation'. Roberts is a writer-sculptor, and her accompanying poem (see 'talks' below) describes this half-screened off place as ‘flattened and formed into fifty shades of still true blues’.

Julie Verhoeven made her name in the world of fashion – sometimes looked down on by the guardians of what should count as art – and it has remained central to her ever-expanding and compellingly madcap practice.  Upstairs, Together We Are Beautiful was made for Marc Jacobs, but channels many an art trope into its stream of visual jokes.  Downstairs, one can read parodies of fashion – as well as of our attitudes to cleanliness, self-presentation, sex and consumerism - into the base humour of Now wash your hands. It was made for Verhoeven’s engagingly maximalist residency as a toilet attendant at the 2016 edition of Frieze.



Summary of Artists’ Talks 25 May 2017

The talking artists: L to R Sarah Roberts, Kate McccGwire, Bronwen Buckeridge, Sara Haq, Tom Lovelace

Tom Lovelace: Lens Flare - Reflections on Looking Up 

Tom began with a definition: Lens flare refers to a phenomenon wherein light is scattered in a lens system, producing an undesirable effect on the image. Flare is particularly caused by very bright light sources, such as when the lens is pointed at the sun.  Being in this show, said Tom, had drawn his attention to the upward-looking and celestial aspect of much of his work. Ladders, stacks and staircases have been prevalent; and Stargazing, 2015, recreates a dud night sky out of glitter, black felt and cheap party lights. The work in ‘The High Low Show’ continues this theme: The Last Sun from Spoleto presents a canvas where the patination has literally been created by the rays of the sun beating down from above. Jim, which combines object and image, presents the wonders of a sun dog, recently photographed above the Yorkshire Hills. The image is illuminated and nestled within an air vent, the intention being to create an encounter and clash of materials which are caught between the functions of machinery and the everyday, and the act of being transfixed in transcendence, in what lies above. 

Bronwen Buckeridge: Do You See What I Hear?

Joining a group armed with bat detectors some years ago, Bronwen was fascinated by how the bats’ clicks could be heard yet the bats could not be seen. There was a confusion between looking and hearing, and that sent her back to the original experiments of Lazzaro Spallanzani in 1790: noticing that bats didn’t – as owls do – bump into objects when flying round a wholly darkened room, he set out to isolate each sense in turn. He covered the bats’ eyes, then plugged their noses, then oiled their bodies as they flew round a room with bells dangling down. The deprivations had no effect, but Spallanzani found that with their ears stuffed the bats could not fly. He deduced that they ‘saw with their ears’, but left his findings unpublished as they were ‘against the laws of creation’. Not until the 1930’s was echolocation fully understood, Yet the sight-sound confusion remains from a non-scientific perspective: when we’re on the ground listening to bats, we’re actually the observed first and observer second, as the clicks may be a result of the bats ‘watching’ us.

 

Kate MccGwire: Natural Born Dualism

Kate was born on the Norfolk Broads, and grew up with a sharp awareness of the violence behind the bucolic vision of nature: most of the ducklings she saw would be taken by pike, foxes or crows. Her own recent bat sighting was indicative: she had thought it odd to see one hanging from a post in broad daylight, and wondered if it was dead, only to see it move. Getting closer, she saw that the movement was caused by the maggots which filled its stomach. As a boat woman (Kate has a Dutch barge on the Thames) she often sees fishermen fishing with maggots, and wanted to capture that aspect of the cycle of life in her art. Putting maggots on paper with graphite, she can alter the lighting to influence their movement, as they seek out as much dark as possible. In the show, that made her ‘maggot drawings’, associated with death and decay, right for downstairs; while her feather works found their place above (it was important, Kate mentioned, that she collects feathers only from moulting, through a network of racing pigeon enthusiasts: no birds are killed for her art).

Julie Verhoeven: HIGH FASHION Low Humour

Julie was unable to attend, leaving Paul to read her words in an imaginary hyper-colourful wig and outlandish dress. She had encompassed the whole vibe, in a tongue in cheek play on ‘artists’ embarrassing cringe monologues’, and gone down ‘the Burroughs / Bowie route, with cut and paste pop songs’. Julie’s text claimed that ‘Words don’t come easy to me’ before getting on to such as: 

There are some things you can’t cover up with lipstick and powder

and I just want to hear girls talk…

Clean shirt, new shoes

Silk suit, black tie

I don’t need a reason why

Art for art’s sake

But it’s not very clear

It’s loud and it’s tasteless.

Why does it hurt when I pee?

Why does it hurt when I pee?

I got it from the toilet seat .It jumped right up

and grabbed my meat.

Art for art’s sake

Push it.

Push it real good

And it’s getting more and more absurd.

It’s sad, it’s a sad, sad situation.

I’m not at the bottom, I’m not at the top.

So this is the stair where I always stop. 

Boom boom!  

Sara Haq: Up and Down

Sara explained that her works’ generic title, ‘Quantum of Solace’, wryly referred to a period of homelessness: she had been fighting the system ‘James Bond style’, but finding some respite in  London’s parks, which have the advantage of being free and providing elemental connections with nature and animals. She noticed how often what might have been up is often down (feathers on the ground, clouds reflected in water, fallen trees), reminding us how we are bound to go through some shit as humans, and yet finding those reminders in a context of uplifting natural beauty. Happily, she has been allocated housing since the show opened, and had felt the place right when she found the previous tenant had pinned a quote by Black Elk to the wall, which muses on how ‘everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle’, citing sky, earth, wind, birds’ nest and the moon. Just so, ‘when a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier’.

 

Sarah Roberts: What to Look for in an Installation

Standing in front of her installation, Sarah advised us to ‘look for nothing’, as for her the key was how the work took her own intensely felt experiences of place, but then remade and rethought them to the point at which you start to look simply at what it is, rather than looking for what lies behind it. Her High Low work is a pool and spa which have become trapped in a casino in Reno, and Sarah shared the ‘love note to herself from Reno’ which was one of the means – photographs, sketches, text – through which she captured those feelings for herself before that process of recombination began. For example:

Walking into the lobby of a Reno-Casino-Spa-Hotel, air conditioning hits her chops from the left with a cool rasp,

she saw her legs dangling over the porcelain and under skirts. Props. 

A potted palm flicked its hair as she leant an armful of sweat on the marble(d) reception desk.  Through the window to the courtyard she glimpsed the swimming pool blue, universal refreshment, globally provided.

Gulp.

Poolside, A fat man belched out his belly before a breast stroke,

cutting through the water like a wet panna cotta on the glide.

Low rollers off the clock were smoothed over sun loungers like pallid custard skins.

Later, she sipped a cocktail called a last word that tastes of the swill at the dentist

with her mouth full of teeth, an overhanging plastic turtle gave her a sense of the beady eye. 

Popping a prawn she felt pink as it slipped uneasily down her gullet, throttled through.

She washed it down with mountain SPAwater in a slippery glass.

The  pool was (in) the middle still, wrapped,

clad  in  the casino, like a center spread in a glossy brag signed by the `Times.

Sealed in, made 3D, Flattened and formed into fifty shades of still true blues.

---

* Otherwise known as a sundog, an atmospheric phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to the side of the sun due to its reflection off clouds