One lonesome sunflower desperately reaches for daylight inside number 60 Walker St, New York. Inevitably, this bloom is going to wither and droop, its leaves will shrivel and curl into themselves and the presence it once occupied will be consumed by something. If anything, this would most likely be another imitation of the flora given this is where Stuart Middleton’s 18 art show at Chapter NY has found its roots. “I wanted to use growth as a process,” the artist narrates in the press release, “to experience some of the jeopardy familiar to agriculture. I nurtured these sunflowers anxiously, looking at the seedlings in the cold frame thinking ‘is this my show?’ I worried about the weather, first for growing, sunlight hours, rain, wind. Then for drying; humidity, airflow, rodents, inevitably fungus.”
Incidentally, each of the occurrences that Stuart Middleton alludes to is determined by time, its progression and regression, inevitability and predictability; from its position at the front window of Chapter NY, the sunflower can observe the minutes, hours, days and weeks as they commence their slow march forwards. As the artist puts it, “growth is measured nationally and economically but also in physical, emotional and even spiritual ways.” “Growing up is to progress isn’t it?” he goes on to ask. That his ecological catalyst for this show measured time, before time itself, at least as we know it, seems inconsequential. To dig this up further, a clique of early timepiece inventors looked to the sunflower’s various choreographies because of its propensity to pursue the sun’s movements by meandering its head.
With 18, on the other hand, Stuart Middleton appears to be more eagerly determined, although not incessantly so, on turning our heads to the contradictory temporal and immediate facets that we concurrently associate with artistic creation. If anybody were to scrutinize the actuality that in two short weeks (at the time of writing), the artist’s show would be coming to a conclusion, such a focus would appear as petty, even, cynical. However, on the part of the artist, there only appears to be a sense of resignation, perhaps even one of profound contemplation, that “so much art is made quickly with plastic, produced factory-like, on demand” and, here, his belief that “the timeline of an exhibition seems brief, rushed in comparison to growing seasons” makes its way to the fore. We, as observers, are prompted to share in both of these perspectives, whilst being guided by this artist’s philosophy that “repetition in relation to a certain model of family. And then maybe an ending. A break. The clock stopping, its spring released.”
18’s other inanimate entity ticks and tocks to a kindred cadence, for one, there is the carriage clocks symbolic dismemberment, and the proliferation of these parts onto numerous mounts positioned throughout Chapter NY. Here, even time stands still, and the “process of cutting up something living,” or “vivisection,” suffuses the void. “It is very relaxing to disassemble a clock,” Middleton says in the accompanying text. “You take it from a compact, ticking instrument to a box of loose parts. To disassemble a factory clock feels like resistance, like the luddites taking their hammers, smashing the means of production. It’s called ‘teardown’ in online jargon.” For the purposes of having a more thorough idea of what precisely this entails, he recommends that “you can watch videos of various things being torn down, mostly consumer electronics; iPhones, kettles.”
Beyond the screen, especially within 18, the scraps are preserved and presented. They become a testament to the 21 days the artist spent “unwrapping and rewrapping cases,” so the previously referenced mounts, which have been assembled from Ultra-V, which is a preservation-grade textile that is manufactured in Europe for the padding of museum cases, could be realized. “When I unpacked the material in the gallery last week, I saw my pencil marks, the holes from mounted objects” he reminisces. “Time collapses. Like when you find an old receipt for something.”
