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future greAtS
Damien Roach
by Skye Sherwin
Damien Roach’s art is like a do-it-yourself kit for rewiring the human brain,
where it is not the (ordinary) materials he works with that are transformed, but
rather the way we see the world around us. Mobil (2007), for example, seen in
the group show Learn to Read at Tate Modern last year, presented an
innocuous collection of objects on a shelf – brown sticky tape, a paperweight,
a pencil, etc – which, when looked at from a certain angle, spelled out the word
‘mobil’ (and which, not by chance, conveys meaning in many languages). With
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sleight-of-hand, Roach demonstrates that something
as simple as a literal change of perspective can bring about a metamorphosis
from object to cipher to language and back again. Such mobility of ideas is
central to his practice, animated across a range of media, from watercolour,
video and collage to carving and found objects.
Using black-and-white vintage magazine images or postcards, Roach
brings to his collage work something reminiscent of John Stezaker. But where
Stezaker uses juxtaposition to rupture how we read an image, Roach’s
mirroring and reversals are liquid invitations to reimagine, as with Untitled
(Transportation) (2006), in which an image of a car is split, reflected back on
itself and turned on its side, so that the sky becomes a void at either side of the
picture, a limbo to fall into. The recent sculpture Field (2007) plays with how
we interpret space, using mirrors slotted into the diamond shapes of a garden
trellis in alternate rows. Walking past it is a disorienting experience in which our
own reflection becomes confused with what we can see through the gaps in
the trellis.
As seen in his 2006 solo show at Gasworks, London, a stack of battered
books against a wall, spines segueing through shades of blue, become the
colours of a landscape (River, Trees, Cloud, Sky, 2005), or the chips in a crappy
old tabletop, on close inspection, are revealed to be delicate carvings of a flock
of birds (6 Degrees Below the Horizon, 2006). In Transit (# 2) (2005), old
postcards are laid out on a wall like a game of dominoes, where the
connections are not matched numbers but images of mountains and
seascapes put together through a rationale of shapes and colours that turn the
world upside down and leap eras and continents, European coastline to the
tropics, in one easy move. Such works challenge us to think beyond the
accepted order of things, of information listed alphabetically, chronologically,
categorically. Indeed his video piece Transmissions (2007), shown at London’s
IBID Projects last December, in which the 1922 Eskimo documentary Nanook
of the North was projected through a crystal as fractured images, drew
attention to the artificially constructed nature of what we consider reality:
much of the film itself, though purporting to be fact, was largely set up to
reflect its audience’s fantasies about Inuit life. Activating overlooked objects
that make up the fabric of daily life, Roach is producing modestly artful works
that hum with resonance for the world beyond the gallery.
from top: Field, 2007, mirrored structure, 230 x 260 cm, edition of 3 + 1AP;
Transit #2, 2005, vintage postcards; Untitled, 2007, watercolour on paper,
72 x 56 cm. facing page: Untitled (ride), 2006, collage, 39 x 19 cm. All works:
photo: Achim Kukulies, courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Artreview 100
FUTURE~1.INDD 100 11/2/08 12:37:25
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