Richard Ducker: Dark Matter

Ducker's ink drawings have a creeping heartbreak about them. In each, smoke rises from intimated destruction. In some images there is more than one point of impact; more than one trail rising slowly up, thick and black.

The drawings are numerous and arranged methodically. Looking at one after another is reminiscent of the evening news, daily horror, peppered with the 'stop and take notice' punctuations of certain images. 

Dark Matter's sculptures can be experienced in this way. Sharp edged objects that cut through the smoke and remind the viewer of the solid objects twisted, charred, destroyed and hidden.

Corinna Spencer

Stoker: A Fantasy Fulfilled

Stoker is the English language debut of Korean director Park Chan-Wook, of The Vengeance Trilogy fame. The film has received mostly scathing reviews based around criticisms such as ‘style over substance’, ‘unconvincing’ and ‘over-indulgent’. Well, maybe. It’s certainly stylised, a vehicle for a director’s personal vision and contains an unlikely plot, but couldn’t that criticism be applied to Psycho, Pulp Fiction and Blue Velvet?

Park isn’t a director to ascribe any kind of message to his work, dealing instead with stunning visuals and devastating plot twists, but that doesn’t mean that Stoker isn’t rife with an infinite number of themes and symbols to pick over. The other thing about this film is it gives the viewer a reason to be sitting in a dark auditorium on a winter evening – excitement. Sensually speaking, Stoker provides an overdose, from the mint green walls of the Stoker residence to the strains of Nancy Sinatra during a seduction scene. A scene that sees Mia Wasikowska play a piano duet with Matthew Goode whilst suspended in a state of sexual ecstasy is enough to encourage a repeated trip to the cinema. 

The film is a gothic horror centred around India, (Mia Wasikowska) an introverted teenager left with her brittle and beautiful mother Evie (Nicole Kidman) after the death of her father. When her mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) turns up to the funeral and begins to charm Evie, India retreats from this charming stranger, suspicious, resentful and watchful. The film veers in genre from wicked stepfather fairytale to crime-spree love affair and finally to somewhere completely different. And it’s not about vampires, despite the leading title. However, on second thought, it is rather heavy on talk of blood.

Since this is a director whose most famous film contains a disturbing twist based on familial relationships – a twist that will temporarily shatter anyone who has ever been a father, daughter, brother or sister – it seems reasonable to explore his portrayal of the Stoker family. To begin with, there is the strained mother-daughter relationship between Evie and India.

Evie’s bitterly honest words to her daughter, of whom she seems resignedly terrified, ‘personally speaking I can’t wait to watch life tear you apart’ slightly echo a line from another Gothic horror, another film symbolising female adolescence and burgeoning sexuality. Ginger Snaps (2000) tells the story of two teenage sisters whose close relationship is threatened when the elder of the two simultaneously hits puberty and becomes a werewolf. In a scene in which Ginger recounts her realisation of her blood lust, she says, ‘I get this ache... and I thought it was for sex, but it's to tear everything to fucking pieces.’ By the end of Ginger Snaps, the pre-adolescent Ginger has disappeared, along with her sisterly relationship. All that’s left is an autonomous being, a monster.

Despite the emphasis on relationships of all kinds, from the familial to the romantic, films like Stoker imply that at least the final step of this journey towards maturity requires compulsory loneliness. This could be why, at the end of most gothic horror films featuring strange girls, from The Craft to Carrie, there is often one girl left, wrenched apart from her fellow characters by an event that has changed her irrevocably. Though her friends, lovers and relatives may have a hand in pushing her along, she reaches the other side alone.

This idea that once grown we are on our own must leave Park thinking about what it is we can instill in our children before it is too late. Park has made a career of hauntingly beautiful but violent films dealing in dark themes of revenge, incest and the origins of evil. In 2006 he made a romantic comedy, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Ok, mainly so his daughter would be able to watch one of his films. Stoker contains a reference to his daughter, explained by Park in an interview for The Guardian. 'There's this element I brought into the film, this talk of wine', says Park of a loaded dinner-table scene:

There's a line where Evie appreciates how mature the wine is, and Charlie says: well, you can't compare it to a younger wine, which is too tannic. But we realise later on that he didn't pick the wine for Evie, but for India. When he pushes the wine to India and says, "1994: the year you were born." And that was the year my daughter was born, so it was a nod to her. 

In the film, India’s father literally arms her before he dies, teaching her to hunt. How well or badly this skill will mix with her nature, only time will tell. Park has said he is interested in the origins of evil, and Stoker asks this question without ever really answering it.

Another director ceaselessly accused of putting style over substance and indeed over ethics is Quentin Tarantino. Over his career he has answered questions about violence in cinema, most recently on the subject of his latest film, Django Unchained. He defends his work in his signature straightforward style. 'If you ask me how I feel about violence in real life, well, I have a lot of feelings about it. It's one of the worst aspects of America. In movies, violence is cool. I like it.'

'Transportive' may be a more useful word than 'cool'; taking the viewer to a place where the fantasy fulfilled is not necessarily a violent one or a vengeful one, but a simple desire to get everything right first time. In a word: resourcefulness. This feeling of watching a character make a decision and execute it perfectly is one of the most joyful experiences in cinema, because it’s rare we would even let ourselves try. Django, Bond, Bourne and India Stoker are all characters with this quality of resourcefulness. One scene in Stoker involves India pre-emptively arming herself with a sharpened pencil and using it to stab her bully in his fist as he raises it to punch her. 

It may be that resourcefulness is all Park will be able to impart to his daughter, one day she will grow up, watch Oldboy and be faced with horror both around and within her. At the very least she’ll be the goth girl survivor at the end of the movie. At the most? Perhaps the goth girl directing the movie.

Sarah Cleaver

Florence Peake's 'Chorus: Swell the thickening surface of' at Tintype

Walking the stairs to Tintype gallery a murmuring chatter gradually comes into earshot. Several people are talking at once, their voices overlapping. They are not, however, vying for attention; their speech is hushed and their words intimate. ‘I was an only child’, says a subdued male voice. ‘Something ambitious in me, and yet I crack.’

Photo Cameron Leadbetter

Entering the gallery, the owners of the voices come into view. A lady with wispy ginger hair is slumped in the corner of the room, unable to get up, her long arms flung high above her head. She wears a lurid dress of orange, green, yellow, and red, and an equally garish hat of purple and blue. The fanciful attire is made from fluorescent vinyl sheeting; her arms, simple wooden planks coated in coloured packing tape; and her face and feet, bunches of pink tissue paper. A tangle of multi-coloured cables sprouts from her hip. They are attached to a car radio. This is the source of her voice.

Next to her is another woman. She is standing, though only just; she leans forwards, propped up against the gallery wall by her oversized wooden arms. Auburn hair spills forward from under a vivid green cape, and at its bottom, orange and green legs protrude to meet turquoise high heels. Her angle is such that the heels of the shoes are lifted from the floor. It seems that perhaps she has had too much to drink, and has stopped to throw up, but there’s no one to hold her hair. ‘It’s a tender process after betrayal; things can easily shatter again’ she says.

Photo Cameron Leadbetter

A figure seated on the floor begins to speak in a male voice. ‘Something about our similarity reassures me.’ A lumpen heap of paper and synthetic hair implies the form of a body out of which sprout two stubby plaster legs.  ‘Something holds me back’, he says. ‘What is it? Oh yes: criticism.’

The voices form a chorus, though, rather than a group joining in homophony, they diverge and intertwine, like many private prayers spoken simultaneously. Just as the simply constructed figures find themselves on display, compromised and dishevelled, so the voices express aloud an imagining of a silent everyday chorus. Hushed internal monologues from a secret inner-life, very much present, but usually unspoken.

Travis Riley

Sharon Kivland: Reproductions II

Mes Plus Belles (1968), 2012, water colour on photographs

The Unconscious Is A City, 2012, 25 postcards with gouache 

Sharon Kivland, in her recent show at Domo Baal, laid bare layers of time through her use of materials and the subsequent shifting of the audience's gaze. The accompanying essays by Jan Campbell and Steve Pile deal with Kivland's preoccupation with Freud and this illuminates some of her feelings and her relationship to place, perhaps the final layer to Kivland's work, which the viewer is invited to peel back, as far as we dare.

Mes Vedettes (my stars), 2012, postcards with gouache applied

At times, under these layers, there is a fascinating dead eyed blankness staring back from the women depicted in the found and altered photographs and prints, who seem well trained in their performance for the camera and for our gaze but not necessarily for our comfort.

Ma Petite Charmeuse, 2012, archival inkjet print on hahnemuhle paper

Corinna Spencer

Reproductions II

Sharon Kivland

18 Jan - 16 Feb 2013

Domobaal

London, WC1

'Arrow to the Heart' - Corinna Spencer & Andrea Hannon

CO-RESPONDENT AT TRANSITION GALLERY - PART 4

Love, friendship and collaboration are all like improvisation in that it’s about saying yes. In improvisational comedy, the one rule is that what one person suggests needs to be agreed with and built upon by the other person. The alternative is that it never goes anywhere. As Andrea Hannon’s short story says ‘In the hands of a horrible assignment we are neither of us happy’.

From Corinna Spencer’s description of the collaborative process as ‘a real joy’ to the seemingly endless dialogue emitting back and forth between the words and images in the work it is clear that the rule of ‘yes’ has been adhered to in this case. Even the small scale of the work, compared to the three other collaborations in Co-Respondent, seems to suggest an intimacy, something held close to the heart. Spencer chose to paint her lead character from the back view. Symbolism-wise this could mean so many things, the idea of leaving springs to mind immediately. On the other hand, turning one’s back implies complete trust, and given the open nature of the work, this seems a more fitting interpretation

In creating her work from existing books, Andrea Hannon works with what is already there. Spencer does the same by painting from contemporary culture. It’s something that (dare I say it) seems to have something to do with womanhood. Carving out what is theirs in what they find around them. The end result undoubtedly belongs to the artists, the final words of the story are ‘He has simply disappeared’.

In describing the beginnings of the project, Spencer explained, ‘we talked about what we thought the text was about, what as individuals we could draw from it and where our feelings about the piece intersected’. 

That word intersected describes the sense of connection that is present in the work. Parade’s End was Spencer’s current obsession before beginning the project. It seems perfect that  Hannon’s short story was so well suited to Spencer’s preoccupation, and indeed it is perfect. It’s a comforting thought that a personal obsession is not a lonely thing at all, just an individual’s fragment of the collective consciousness.

That idea of intersection comes into play in the story of Parade’s End itself. An unhappily married man with Edwardian values and an idealistic suffragette meet accidentally, and of course, against all odds, it turns out that they love each other, better than that they are good for each other. A fitting story for a piece of art that depends on bringing the best out of one another.


Sarah Cleaver

Co-Respondent

16 February - 3 March 2013

Transition Gallery

Unit 25a Regent Studios

8 Andrews Road

London E8 4QN

This is the fourth of four texts about Co-Respondent, a show about collaboration which foreshadows the upcoming issue of Garageland 15: Collaboration which will be launched on 19 April 2013. 

'19 Days' - Sarah Cleaver & Paul Kindersley

Co-Respondent at Transition Gallery - Part 3

Sarah Cleaver’s essay, which forms part of her collaboration with Paul Kindersley, starts off by talking about Jung’s use of word association with his patients, and about a sense of collaboration that can be built up between analyst and analysand. She uses the word ‘lulled’, and one can imagine, in looking at their work, how pleasurable this sense of being lulled into collaboration, can be.

The work, titled 19 Days came from an email correspondence between Kindersley and Cleaver, an exchange of images, short notes, poems and videos, in a chain of associations, one leading to the next, back and forth, over the chosen specified time. In setting up the rules of their project, they were inspired by the work of Sophie Calle, thinking in particular about her work with the writer Paul Auster.

19 Days takes the form of a pin board of images and short texts selectively edited from their exchange, plus the essay by Cleaver made in response to this, and additionally a QR code. This code can be scanned by a smartphone loaded with appropriate app, and leads to the 80s electronic disco song Cherchez Pas by Madleen Kane; adding another pleasure with which to delight the viewer’s senses. One can feel the seemingly limitlessness resource of online information we have at our fingertips, but also get a sense of the swapping of cultural nuggets between friends with some shared sensibilities, and the final piece is carefully honed and edited.

Cleaver’s essay mentions television police using the pin board format to organize maps and photographs of leads and evidence. This reference is there in the pin board in 19 Days but with its matt black fabric surface and the saturated colour of some of the images, what also comes to mind is a display of jewelry. There is a seduction also, of course, in the images themselves – of sexy bodies, touch, revealing, concealing, textures, surfaces, display, performance.

One cannot but help wanting to start ones own string of connections from the rich leads of this work – and what better place than with the first image of this exchange – an image of a girl on a beach, taken from the 1976 Catherine Breillat film A Real Young Girl. Co-incidentally (or perhaps not), before seeing the work, I had also just watched this film, which was recommended to me by Urara Tsuchiya (my own collaborator in Co-Respondent). She saw it recently with Paul Kindersley, after YouTube fortuitously flagged it up for them, in relation to another film they had just seen. And so the chain of associations goes on.


Mimei Thompson

Co-Respondent

16 February - 3 March 2013

Transition Gallery

Unit 25a Regent Studios

8 Andrews Road

London E8 4QN

This is the third of four texts about Co-Respondent, a show about collaboration which foreshadows the upcoming issue of Garageland 15: Collaboration which will be launched on 19 April 2013. 

'A Sonnet Made Real' - Travis Riley & Sarah Bernhardt

Co-Respondent at Transition Gallery - Part 2

Travis Riley and Sarah Bernhardt’s collaboration invites the viewer to employ all of his/her senses to take part. From the smell of the bee pollen so carefully applied to the top of a plinth to a soft-spoken Sonnet made tactile and shiny on its copper printing plates.

Riley says of the sonnet that ‘It’s always lacked a physical manifestation that would allow it to exist anywhere other than on a page’. There is a sense of liberation about the work somehow. The pollen feels as if it could lift off of the wooden plinth and swirl upward together with the plain pigment yellow of its counterpart plinth. Simultaneously the words escape the page to the copper plate and then onwards in its distribution.

The Sonnet, the starting point for Riley and Bernhardt, describes a relationship of unrequited longing. Under the ever-present gaze of its surroundings it is made whole and reciprocated by the collaboration itself, a process that mirrors the very presentation of a collaborative project.  

Corinna Spencer

Co-Respondent

16 February - 3 March 2013

Transition Gallery

Unit 25a Regent Studios

8 Andrews Road

London E8 4QN

This is the second of four texts about Co-Respondent, a show about collaboration which foreshadows the upcoming issue of Garageland 15: Collaboration which will be launched on 19 April 2013.