Yellow Office, 2013, C-print on museum board, wood and hardware, 35x35x10cm
Walking
into the Isidro Blasco exhibition can look at first like a high-end,
post-modern Hobbyco store. There is a lot of plywood joinery and delicately
assembled collage that would of required dexterity of a practiced model maker in
order to get to their finished state. Categorically they fall between wall
mounted sculpture or 3D photo montage, depending on what angle you’re looking
from.
This
is Blasco’s third solo show at the formidably tasteful Dominik Mersch Gallery.
Born in Madrid and now New York based his works are a combination of collage,
photography, architecture and deft skill with a glue gun. The format varies
from exhibition to exhibition but the themes remain constant. Blasco’s works
are all meditations on place, space, memory and perception.
Sydney Interiors is a continuation
from his 2011 Australian residency and shows (Tilt at DMG and The Laneway
Project with the City of Sydney). These previous exhibitions were surveys
of exteriors in the city: laneways, skylines, aerial views and streetscapes
that Blasco configured in his distinct style of collage-construction. His 2013 exhibition
is again the result of a two-month residency in Sydney where Blasco turned his
attention to the interior to produce a body of work that examines the values we
place on our inside environment.
The
subjects in this exhibition are domestic, commercial, private and public Sydney
interiors. Apparently his initial plan was to record the interiors of celebrity
Sydney-siders but he abandoned that pursuit in the early stages of the project.
Perhaps he read too much of Andrew Hornery’s column or maybe he just felt
easier around the arts set. Either way it’s for the best as viewers now get to
see inside some of the beautiful, humble and historic interiors of this city.
Audiences
can take instant delight in these works, as they are immediately accessible on both
conceptual and experiential level. There is a simple thrill in getting up close
and looking in, around, over and behind the montages. The tiny scale of the
works forces the you to come right up to the display and requires you to
physically move around in order to see more sections of the collage. It is also
like the gallery equivalent of an open-house inspection as you get to perve on
their bookshelves and see what’s in the pantry. It’s as if you are physically
in the space, you have to look around corners and up walls in order to see
what’s there.
The
montage process requires Blasco to take numerous panoramic photos of the area
from the same angle. He then cuts them up and reconstructs them in 2D and 3D
forms in accordance to a sense-view rather than a realistic view of the space.
What this does is create a much more intuitive way of looking that is much more
akin to how we really absorb our visual field.
Interestingly,
the approximate bandwidth of the human retina is about 8960 kilobits per second, which is equivalent to the amount of content on two sheets of typed
paper. The point being is that we take in so much more visual content than we
are aware of and most of it just becomes lost data. What Blasco’s work does is
record all of the details- indiscriminately and compulsively recording the full
spectrum of what we look at and what we actually see.
Of
a similar vein is the after-image phenomenon that Blasco refers to in a number
of his essays. This is the wonderful sensation of the optic nerve fooling the
brain into seeing something that’s not there. Being in this exhibition is a
little bit like looking at stills of after-images, all overlapping and merging
into each other outwitting the eye and mind.
The
wooden support structures that hold the works are both a practical and
aesthetic consideration. Instead of a concealed and neat system we see this
erratic plywood nest, jutting out at awkward angles. These exposed skeletons
give the works architectural as well as sculptural qualities. They can also
read like a wood-frame construction or scaffolding gone mad. This is perhaps a coincidental
comment on the modus operandi of most arts enterprises: well-organised chaos.
The
more conceptual aspects of Blasco’s practice are his ideas on the significance
of place and space and the influences of perception and memory. Sydney Interiors is like a visual essay on
these themes. You can’t help but feel the sincerity and kindness that Blasco
brings to these reconstructions of private places and shared spaces. He treats
all the subjects with affection and sensitivity, giving as much attention to
the modest and humble as he does the illustrious and ornate.
Some
of the standouts include The Godess II,
a panoramic interior of a grand old Valiant car resplendent in its original turquoise
upholstery. Yellow Office is a
fabulous fly-on-the-wall view of the power station that is Wayne Tunnicliffe’s
desk. In comparison to the other works this one really bursts against the
confines of its surface area. Groaning bookshelves bulge out at the viewer and
hide Tunnicliffe under the abundance catalogues.
Hibernian House is more accurate description
of how most ‘creatives’ live, which usually is cramped, communal and fairly subsistent.
This work is unwieldy in its assembly and juts out in all directions, aptly
describing the nature of this creative residence that grants so many artists the
ability to work and live in this frightfully expensive city.
Ultimately
what Blasco’s work prompts us to think about is how and through what
significance does a space turn into a place? Are places made through the tangible
things they contain? Or are places made by the intangible memories and presence
that we attach to them? And is a psychological and emotional sense of place what
we need, rather than space itself?
This
exhibition also illuminates the fact that how we see our world is entirely different
from how others see it. We use perception and memory as primary tools to build the
framework that becomes our reality. The idiom that it is perception not truth
that matters is perhaps the most fitting summary of Blasco’s works in Sydney Interiors.
And
in art as in life, perception is everything.
