In search of lost time / Remembrance of things past

To EXHIBITION

The works in this exhibition seem to disagree about how we might look at the past in order to make sense of the present. Hope glimmers alongside dark and cynical resignation, but there might still be space for a few final, quiet notes of peaceful transcendence. At times we gaze at the past with fondness, while at other times glancing over our shoulders as disappointment and dread propel us into an unknown future.

Billy Apple’s 1965 sculpture Rainbow captures the spirit of a time when consumer culture was a celebrated aspect of modern living, when the acquisition of shiny and new things was an enviable pursuit. The symbol of the rainbow, rendered fluorescent, exudes pure simplicity and cartoon-like positivity. Rainbow represents an era we now view through a lens of both nostalgia and regret, from the vantage point of a world where the excess and wastage of rampant mass manufacture and mass consumerism has both engulfed our way of life and threatened to be its undoing. The sculpture’s spectral vibrancy also alludes to the emergence of psychedelia and the joys of early experimentations with hallucinogens, which now seem naïve when viewed in the context of drugs’ destructive reality.

Mikala Dwyer’s ‘empty sculptures’ could be seen as both searching for and rejecting the ultimate form. With millennia of sculptural practice behind us, what creation could possibly define contemporary sculpture? Dwyer’s answer seems to be both everything and nothing – a void through which we see first just air, then the gallery space and finally the world beyond – those thousands of years of sculptural history encapsulated within an empty space. Sculpture and secret 2007, like many of Dwyer’s ‘empty sculptures’, can be taken as a paradox of three dimensional form – appearing both organic (in form and arrangement) and human-made (through the medium of moulded plastic). Simultaneously cumbersome and unbearably light, this work contains both nothing and everything within its twinkingly barren forms. Most intriguingly, it contains a secret, which encapsulates hope and possibility that this sculpture – and sculpture generally – has the potential for contemporaneity and renewal.

Ricky Swallow uses the hindsight we feel when we view works such as Billy Apple’s Rainbow to create a work which juxtaposes and ponders the rise and fall of two distinct yet parallel figures, John Phillips and Mary Magdalen. Depicting more specific sculptural influences than Dwyer’s work, the history of the subjects speaks volumes despite their diminutive scale. What can we hope to learn from the past, when history seems to be showing us that neither self-denial (in Mary Magdalen’s case) nor excess (such as the rock-star lifestyle of John Phillips) are paths to fulfilment?

Ronnie van Hout’s Failed Robot (2007) also remembers the past in order to search for a lost future. Alluding to a past in which any future could be imagined via the surreality of science fiction, the present is shown to have let down these celebratory predictions. If we conclude that we have failed in the present then we represent a future which has failed the past. Like the other sculptures in this exhibition, this work encapsulates our combined modern-day emotions of acceptance and alarm that what we hoped could be has not become so. We remember with nostalgia, but also search around us, sometimes with a barely repressed sense of panic.

Rob McHaffie’s work searches for a time when suburbia was considered a satisfactory outcome. Now all the chests puffed with pride within their business suits no longer return home to the suburbs, but to a city where simple emotions no longer have a place. McHaffie’s work pays homage to the pathetic person we all sometimes feel underneath our suits. This Ol’ fashion kinda guy (2007) represents an antidote to the dilemmas embodied in the other sculptures in this exhibition by attempting to meditate through and transcend those dilemmas in its own quiet, modest way.

Just as the title of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu has been variously translated as both Remembrance of things past and In search of lost time, these sculptures translate as both reflective and regretful. Although we can’t hope to know our future, how we view the past can help us to grasp our present times.