"possible" in Soanyway Magazine, Volume 2, Issue Three, June 2019, UK

Issue 3 includes two ‘exhibition features’, introducing a further development to the relaunched magazine following Issue 2’s special insert. The intention is to respond to recent exhibitions and events, bringing them into dialogue with submitted works that respond independently to the magazine’s description. Ilana Halperin’s Minerals of New York (Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds, 29 March – 9 May 2019 and touring to The Hunterian, Glasgow) considers the possibility of a city’s mineral biography, an interaction between archaeology, geology and the everyday; the unravelling of a city’s narrative through time. William Mackrell’s LipSync series shown in Here is where we meet (Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, May – 15 June 2019) explores the potential of performance to leave behind a trace of its movement, capturing the fragile process of language; the language which frames and censors our daily expression.

A tapestry of objects are woven together in Lauren de Sa Naylor’s text, through the movement of a fragmented narrative which omits people’s names, beginning with an almost empty bottle of wine and ending with empty beer glasses. Everyday objects appear in the paintings of Richard Baker, whose internal framings emphasise the absence of people and movement. The obscured windows of Eta Dahlia’s video poetry invite imaginary figures and objects to fill them with a presence, and considers translation over both language and medium. It questions how much might be communicated via a limited quantity of words and vague images. Kamila Müllerová creates a haunting dialogue between objects, cloth and light, with the occasional appearance of a figure treated as object; and sound is used to unite the images in a literal knot. Figures appear and disappear in the double narrative of Martha Stanford Campbell’s image poetry, emphasising their fragility against the contrasting sturdiness of objects, paralleled by the photographs’ stillness and the words’ movement.

Fragility of human presence is also suggested in Jean-Michel Rolland’s time-lapse, where people are noticeably absent from the construction of an urban landscape. Through its process, there is an ambiguity as to its medium: it is uncertain whether the image is painted, drawn or photographed. The play between movement and print is offered by Emily Evans’ construction of a new typeface inspired by dance. Here, motion becomes framed in the shapes of letters, an attempt to place wordless expression into print. There is a similar sense in Pierre Yves Clouin’s ‘found-drawing’, a film almost motionless like a drawing, its sound of a busy road revealing otherwise, and suggests that mundane sights or scenes might be frozen and reworked. In Kerry Baldry’s film, plastic bags are used to package stone deities, archaeological artefacts which appear to breathe with disturbing force within their containers. Such artefacts, minerals and objects are presented as framed and channelled through the endless collection of Google, an everyday means of research which invites both digression and distraction, given a narrative by Marion Menan’s hypnotic scrolling that also echoes Ilana Halperin’s museological research of geological samples.

In this issue, there is an interaction between objects and time; between the contrasting steadiness of objects and spaces as people appear and disappear within and around them. With the passing, layering and weaving of time, cities, objects and language tangle people up in their endless narratives. These narratives are a means to capture evidence of living presence, leaving behind frames that invite habitation, and the retelling of stories.  

Le ‘dessin trouvé’ de Pierre Yves Clouin semble aussi [cadrer le mouvement, tenter d’imprimer une expression sans mot]. C’est un film presque immobile comme un dessin, mais le son, d’une route très fréquentée, révèle la vérité et suggère que des choses ordinaires et des scènes banales pourraient être captées et reconstruites.