La Mer Insomniaque at Laura Bartlett Gallery

Artists: Natalie Häusler, Eric Sidner, Margo Wolowiec

Exhibition title: La Mer Insomniaque

Venue: Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, UK

Date: January 30 – March 8, 2015

Photography: Courtesy of the artists and Laura Bartlett Gallery

To be cross-eyed, is to be unable to aim at a singular, unified, point in space. It is a condition that creates destabilizing lacunas in one’s comprehension of the world, a state in which images stretch out sideways, over or away from each other. Between the blind spots two globular psycho-cyclopic visionaries dissociated at birth. Set apart from them, on the other side of a meridian separating excess from absence, an old car cover and a china dog describe a strange levitation.

An impoverished, desiring, gestalt has no singular point of origin it can only make for an insensible image, a site of tension between creative misperception and obfuscation.

Margo Wolowiec’s hand woven tapestries enact this theatre of the image, in which the sign, the mark and the gesture struggle through the processual repressions of the composition and the network towards the light of the surface; warp meets weft, palimpsest meets palinopsia.

Natalie Häusler starts with the word, playing with its capacity to tease a disguise from a disclosure. Her CORALS evoke an absent voice, the acoustic reverberations of a poem recited rather than read, whilst the Case Mods play with the enigmatic collaboration between the different ways we can receive and partake in a work. The physicality of the text is abstracted in these works, caesuras become spaces for the body to wander in and out of, between elusive fragments of what lies just beyond the literal or the literary.

The strange relationship that exists between silicone, as a material, and the human senses is laid out on Eric Sidner’s table. The gelatinous jewels repel and attract simultaneously, their viscera and surface confused and inseparable. It is the same fake fluidity of the air animating Sidner’s eerily distended polythene, in which the currents make for a dissonant materiality and voluptuous stasis.