Sara Givins's 'Vanish'

Sara Givins, In Search of Percival Redwood, 2010. Vinyl, pine ply wood, light. Dimensions variable. Photograph by Joy Lai

It’s in my blood…The malady I suffer from has been with me since childhood, and no one but God and myself knows the fearful horror I have had to face the consequences of my crime.[1]

Those words are from the confessions of Amy Bock, a con-woman known as ‘The Masquerader.’ Bock committed numerous petty thefts and frauds in New Zealand in the early 20^th Century. Her crimes included disguising herself as a man, whom she named Percival Redwood, and marrying an unwitting heiress.[2] It’s a story of multiple deceptions of identity, gender and sexuality. And it straddles the contested boundaries of fiction, non-fiction and autobiography with which contemporary culture is currently preoccupied. 

However fascinating the subject, Sara Givins isn’t trying to tell us the tale of Amy Bock’s misadventures or the way her unstable self prefigured postmodern treatments of identity. Givins’ target is the slippages of communication that the story demonstrates, the misrepresentations, ambiguities and misunderstandings, and the claims of language to tell us much of anything we can hold onto.

Givins’ installation In Search of Percival Redwood (2010) takes Bock’s confession and treats it like a found object. She has enlarged, mutated and abstracted the text, rendering it illegible. Brightly coloured opaque vinyl is applied to the window that makes up the front and side of Firsftdraft Gallery. It is a veiling device that entices and prevents clear vision. The pattern is made up of cut-away letter shapes stretching out from a series of vanishing points like hyped up cartoon graphics. Inside the gallery, a sculptural form is echoed and repeated four times in different sizes and permutations. Reminiscent of kit homes and of magicians’ boxes, they are constructed from mirrored triangles of marine ply, masked with the same adhesive vinyl from which more of Givins’ distorted font has been sliced. Givins has deliberately not used a code or a system to generate her hieroglyphs. Each letter has been individually morphed and sweetly cut out by hand. The resulting characters are reflected onto the floor and walls of the room. Some appear almost familiar, like skewed gender symbols, arrows or punctuation marks. But they can only hint and allude to meaning. And the projection of shadows reconfigures with each slight shift of natural light.

Givins suggests that language warps through context, reflection and memory into abstraction. That as soon as we have read, or heard or spoken words, they start to disintegrate and reform as abstracted impressions. And this is what Givins makes material in this installation, with the changes of scale, the mirrored surfaces and the flickering play of light.

Amy Bock’s words have been reconstituted as a delirious, sensory experience. The audience is enclosed by the text, their image captured in mirrors and reflected back as ciphers. Givins’ use of kaleidoscopic colour startles, and then disarms. The work implies that language is a space we inhabit with our bodies, and that it is one of pleasurable disarray.

Givins’ ongoing influences are as much from the worlds of literature, from concrete poetry and storytelling, as they are from the immersive installations of visual arts. Edibleland (2005) at The Physics Room consisted of adhesive vinyl silhouettes and text that spread out over the walls and the ceiling, a fictitious creation narrative of the founding of the Canterbury region of New Zealand. This work also made merry with colour and playfulness. The graphics and the text had the appearance of a child’s fairytale but the rampant desire depicted inferred that Givins’ seduction of the viewer was intended to disturb. In her own version of a confidence game, she misled her audience for their own good, so that they might not be fooled again.

Another of Givins’ works, Swarm 11:9 (2007), was based on the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel, in which God punished humanity by creating multiple languages and nations, thus removing people’s ability to understand one other. Givins did not use text to represent this cataclysmic loss of comprehension. The installation took the unsettling form of 119 wooden cutouts of insects in massed flight around the gallery walls. These earlier artworks point to Givins’ ongoing interest in the function of language in myth making and grand operatic narratives. It’s the promise of language and its failures that inform her visual practice.

In all of Givins’ work, language mutates between its potential to disclose and to withhold. In Search of Percival Redwood makes use of both tendencies. Masking the window of the gallery has created peepholes for passers-by. The indecipherable text that reverberates through the gallery is a slow disrobing, teasing the audience and distracting them from the quest. Percival Redwood is an illusion of language. Strip back the veils and there is nothing left to see.

What Givins’ search results in is the suggestion that what is lost or hidden in attempts to communicate is as tangible as what remains. 

Lynne Barwick

Firstdraft Gallery, 2010

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[1] http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=OW19090728.2.336&l=mi&e=-------10--1----0-all (Accessed May 01, 2010

[2] http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/trials-notable/12 (Accessed May 01, 2010)

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, 'Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why'

image courtesy Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro and Gallery Barry Keldoulis

 
 Children’s building blocks are not the obvious choice to depict a disaster that was heralded by a confusion of vapour trails on the television, but they are surprisingly apt. Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro have used LEGO bricks to reconstruct images of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion. The nine works are shallow relief wall sculptures. Each one documents an instant from the spectacular few seconds in which the shuttle broke up. The artists have borrowed the exhibition title Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why from Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who perished along with the six astronauts. It was the name of a lesson McAuliffe had written and intended teaching to school children from space. While this could augur a hefty dose of irony, the works have a visual complexity that suggests a more considered approach. The vibrant, pixel patterning of the plastic bricks destabilizes the viewers’ eye which trips over the glossy, uneven surfaces. It’s convincing, yet unfamiliar topography. The commonplace nature of LEGO emphasises the remoteness of the catastrophe and amplifies the quality of sublime conveyed by the original NASA footage.

These new works prompt correlations with the artists’ sculptures and installations that have focused on temporary, mobile or defunct housing. A key early work, The Cordial Home Project (2003) involved the dismantling of an entire weatherboard house to its constituent materials, and the reassembling of the components into a neat, minimalist, rectangular stack in the gallery space. It was an ambitious work and one that announced artists who had emerged with a fully formed theme. They have since elaborated their territory with a multitude of carefully-honed variations. The artists’ working life has been marked by numerous international residencies and a succession of transitory homes, and they have most often made art from found objects and the living environments to hand. In Germany, an old caravan was flattened, cut to size and stacked in precise piles on four shipping pallets. In another work, the residual contents of an abandoned artists’ warehouse were roped together in a glorious, teetering pile. People are absent from the works except as former inhabitants and previous owners of objects. The artists imply that the discards of our consumption define us.

Most critical responses to Healy & Cordeiro’s work have focused on affinities with the architectural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark and the domestic casts of Rachel Whiteread. But their work belongs just as much to the world of measurement and precision, to archives and databases, to Christian Boltanski and the enumeration of loss. Healy & Cordeiro constructed their exhibition Life Span (2009), with 175, 218 videotapes arranged in a nifty monolith. To watch the tapes beginning to end say the artists, would take 60.1 years, the average life span in 1976 when VHS technology was released. Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why consists of similarly sombre works that disguise their underlying message (Remember that you must die) under the comforting cover of gentle wit and pleasing distractions. One of the Challenger works, T+85_blue (2010), recasts the blackness of space as a vivid blue sky, while the billowing smoke plume of the collapsing shuttle has a jaunty, pinkish hue. The other works are also luridly coloured and instantly accessible. In a practice that has concentrated on both minor and catastrophic attrition, on the extraneous goods of homes and lives, Healy & Cordeiro have consistently produced well conceived and resolved, high-end art. There is a calculated tension in their work between the degraded substances they select to work with and the polish of the art processes they apply. Fragments are put back together; the neglected and the ruined are given a new context and purpose, made whole again. However, the works themselves suggest that this regeneration is a temporary state. The construction methods are impermanent and the artists’ work can be easily undone. Healy & Cordeiro have extended their investigation of shelter from the suburbs of Sydney to outer space, from the mobile home to the grave. Everywhere they turn, the casings that contain us are disintegrating.

Lynne Barwick, 2010 
'Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why' was at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, 6 May - 26 June 2010