DOUBTFUL WORKS AND COPIES
Alasdair Gray, Rupert Norfolk and Jane Topping
Transmission Gallery 29 January - 26 February 2005
In Alasdair Gray's Lanark the art student Duncan Thaw describes his attempts to paint the Blackhill Locks in Glasgow. In order to overcome his difficulties describing the weight and spaciousness of the site which cannot be appreciated from any one view-point, Thaw invents a perspective which allows the locks to be seen simultaneously from both below and above as "a giant lying on his side, with eyes more than a hundred feet apart and tilted at an angle of 45 degrees". Having satisfactorily rendered the physical dimensions of his subject Thaw's Locks became "so solid that he wanted them to frame something vaster".
"He changed the time of day from afternoon to gloaming and made a black descending dart high up between the moon and on the roof of his old primary school. Being painted on the sky it could not fall, nor could the crowds under it escape. They fled along towpaths, over bridges, and collected on heights, yet there was no brutality in their fearful rush: mothers still clung to children, fathers shielded both, on open spaces single figures pointed to doors in the hillside."
Aspects of the work of Jane Topping and Rupert Norfolk in Doubtful Works and Copies are revealed by their proximity to Gray's Lanark, represented in the show by a single illustration (Untitled 1981). Whilst not exactly 'fantastic' in the way in which parts of Gray's Lanark are, they at least share in the magical realist desire to "seize the paradox of the union of opposites". The magical realist fusion of rational and supernatural are here replaced by something closer to a fusion of quotidian or verifiable fact with perceptual illusion or slippage.
This becomes most clearly apparent when considering Norfolk's precise renditions of atmospheric effect upon relatively familiar structures. The careful transcription of patterns of light and shadow results in the transformation of steel I beams (I Beams, 2004) and a hand-woven rug (Pixelweave, 2004) into curious sculptures that shift in and out of focus as the viewer moves around them. The light source, faithfully transcribed through the application of spraypaint shading on the beams and by shadows incorporated into the weave of the rug is in fact testament to a brief moment in time. This moment, described in terms of the basic component of visual perception (light hitting an object) is frozen through it's incorporation into the surface form of the sculpture yet paradoxically removed from the viewers current encounter by it's eternal indifference to the shifts of light in the here and now.
Jane Topping's paradoxical fusions rely in the most part on text configured together with an image. The frequently bizarre nature of the juxtaposition of image and text in works such as Interlope (2004), or It's Like That But it's Not That Now (2004) seem to intimate an incommensurability in the field of signification. Language is presented as a combination of evocative components muddled in a form of nostalgic reconfiguration. As in Gray's Lanark, worlds cross over and merge into a search for familiarity (in Lanark symbolised by sunlight and love). Topping's use of seemingly contradictory pictorial or textual elements have a similarity bicameral feel to the part semi-autobiographical part surrealistic narrative of Lanark and they similarly synthesise to produce a politicised account, in Topping's case falling within the contestations of language and signification. These contestations do not seem intent upon a constant reiteration of a limited variety of themes. Make Tools of the Folly (2005), a small sculptural work consisting of a series of artist's willow charcoal ladders reaching up towards an indeterminate height, is exhibited in close proximity to the drawings. It then becomes possible for the folly alluded to in the title to be read as the marks on the drawings themselves. These follies become reconfigured as a set of desires or aspirations; the material stuff of the image becomes a semantic tower, forever incomplete as it reaches out towards myriad possibilities.
Nick Evans 2005
Transmission Newsletter
April 2005