Arcadia Missa is excited to present Recital, the inaugural exhibition in our new 1st floor gallery space.
For this group exhibition, we are looking at the notion of performativity from the perspective of the artwork and the act that it fulfils. The “performativity” here is not defined by any strict set of aesthetic terms, but instead looks at the process of making the work in relation to the purpose it fulfills within the context of being shown in the gallery space, to an audience. At the forefront is the performativity of the artwork itself and its transformative capacity.
Upon entering the room, one is followed by Sang Woo’s You're looking at me 003—we are looked back upon by the painting and our position as a viewer is marked as an active state, a consuming force. This act of viewership-as-surveillance, or our interaction with the work itself, become the terms on which we enter the exhibition.
In Alex Margo Arden’s works performativity is at the forefront of the subject matter, the four paintings depict one of the five photographs taken of The Cottingley Fairies. These were images taken by two cousins Elsie Wright (1901–1988) and Frances Griffiths (1907–1986), who claimed to have seen real fairies and photographed them. The image chosen by the artist to reproduce was the fifth and final photograph, which both claimed to have taken, and is likely a double exposure. When confessing the hoax, they were in disagreement about this photograph: Elsie said that it was a fake, while Frances insisted it was a genuine photograph of fairies. As much as a sense of performance is engraved in the visual of the paintings, it is the performance of labour that underpins these works. Each canvas is made by a different commercial painter instructed to copy the image. The outcomes become evidence of interpretation, and when collated together act as a reinvestigation of the original photographs content.
As with Arden’s works, suddenly, Hamishi Farah’s hyper realistic figurative paintings seem abstract. Sven Lüttickenwritesaboutthe return to formalism, he argues that “form should be thought of as the mediation-—and, at times, the conflict—between deep structure and concrete articulation.Form enacts a dialectic of the concrete and the abstract—an oscillation that makes it central to modern thought”. The abstraction in Farah’swork is not figurative but contextualised, the painting does not reflect upon itself and the context of the artist, but it abstracts the position of the viewer within the current cultural sphere of production.
Throughout the show there is a suggestion that the productional aura of the work isn’t dependent on the processes tied to the artist but the processes experienced by the viewer.Ultimately, we question whether any signifier can exist in singularity. In Edgar Calel’s works Runojel xa xti jotayimpe, Runojel xaxti tzolimpe, ceuech riruach’ulew (Everything Will Blossom, Everything Will Reappear Before the Face of the Earth), which he and his family have done collectively, the static becomes active through what the artwork signifies and therefore what it performs within the context that it resides in. His canvases feature landscapes, objects, relics, concepts and experiences, that are only known to him and his family, but that are of spiritual importance to the Maya Kaqchikel people. The paintings are then covered almost entirely with clay collected from a sacred forest where they perform sacred rituals and offerings, and presented in the gallery space. They might decide to shed their clay and present themselves at some point, but this choice lies with the painting— with the knowledge embedded on each canvas hidden in plain sight under the earth, and only to be revealed when the moment is right and we are finally ready to experience it and take it in.
Helen Chadwick’s Wreath of Pleasure is from a series of photographs made over 1992-93, of flowers which have been precisely arranged in combination with poisonous or pleasurable liquids such as chocolate and Windolene. Flowers stuck between life and death. Chadwick changes the visual language around how we depict sexuality and bodily forms—subverting signifiers and playing with the theatricality of those which she uses. The processes captured in the photo are carried into each space they are exhibited.
Similar to Chadwick, Deborah-Joyce Holman plays with visual compositions and techniques to retain agency. Meditating on Black and queer subjecthood in visual culture, the work documents two performers reciting excerpts of Portrait of JasonbyShirley Clarke. The linear timeline of visual references has been reflected back to itself, displacing the viewer in a space defined by one’s own references interacting both with the community but also the individual.
Noting the agency contained in all these practices paves a way for the artworks to perform and opens up space for the present to unravel and reveal itself from a different angle, which can be rationalised if one wishes to do so.Essentially the one interacting with the performativity of the work is the one most exposed at a certain moment in time, the viewer.
