Ruark Lewis Banalities of the Perfect Home 28 April - 2 June 2007
'Ruark Lewis (b. 1960) is one of Australia's more intriguing artists. Also a writer, his installations often use experimental texts and poetry to explore ideas visually through art. Ruark has been showing since the early 1980s, and has had exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Art Gallery of South Australia, his important piece "Raft" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1995) and Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. In 2000 he produced a 3 kilometer-long text work "Relay" at Homebush stadium for the Olympics, and most recently was included in Charles Mereweather's 2006 Biennale of Sydney with the piece "False Narratives". His works continue to push the boundaries of definitions and to explore the realms of the outer consciousness, where sensorial and cognitive responses meld in a new understanding of the world we occupy. This installation titled "Banalities for the Perfect House" could be thought of as a 'construction site for ideas'. As we read down the text on the façade of 38 Botany Road Alexandria, we are immersed in its simple abstractions - "Trees conceal small books", "Stodge belittles starchy foods" and "United we fly" - words whose meanings are still under construction, like the ingredients of a recipe that forms into something else. It is what Ruark calls 'a people's poem'. Confronted by text in this environment, one starts to question the function of words and their relationship to a visual experience. Are they merely a visual rhythm of white stencilled on black? Their nonsensical groupings resonate with a glimmer of recognition: they speak of a worker, a wife, a student. As the letters begin to vibrate in an optical intensity, the words fall into chaos forming new chains and connections. Do they weave a picture of banality or perfection? Do we whisper the words with inner amusement or with the bravado of poetry? This is not the first time Ruark Lewis has worked in Redfern. The Performance Space on Cleveland Street invited him to make a work in 2005. It resulted in a collaboration with Melbourne-based publisher and composer Rainer Linz and the first version of 'Banalities for the Perfect House' - a performance / sound based installation. In this earlier event the 4 meter text slats were shown in a vertical orientation, defining the performance space as a picket fence would define the Australian dream. You can listen to Ruark performing these text works online at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/articles/perfecthouse/ So this work has a history of antecedents, explained in an interview with Olivia Kurts (on the abovementioned site), 'Another building Ruark and Rainer examined in their collaborations was the 1950s experimental dwelling known as The Glasshouse designed by Bill Lucas. This has some of the qualities that appeared later in the theatre [piece at Performance Space and indeed this work for SLOT]'. "Its a see-through house. Close to the roadway, but screened effectively by trees and bushes. This building is interesting; … [There is] a very ordered layering of linear forms that allows the dweller to read through, anticipate and sense the world they are occupying." In contrast, for SLOT, Ruark has transformed the façade by employing the text-boards to 'mask' the building, veiling its glass windows from the world beyond. The literal conversation the text proposes is pushed to a more extreme engagement, their linear stacking speaking to the architecture of the building. As curator Reuben Keehan said of Ruark's Banalities, "Moreover, it suggests a language that is not primarily visual or verbal but fundamentally spatial." It is a construction upon a construction. The text engages us on both a macro and micro level as we move along the streetscape, eventually coming to a stand in front of the shop, reading. Ruark questions how and what we are viewing: Is it a people's poem, abstract art or a boarded window? What do these musings say to this neighbourhood? How does language parallel societies irregularities? In the same way a filmset constructs a scene, Ruark uses the architecture of SLOT to fabricate a new reality. It forces us to think about our immediate surroundings in a different way. Ruark explains his 'Banalities for the Perfect House' 2005, "The work posits the house as a condition through which we perceive the world - the city an extension of grid-like structures viewed through the frame of an open window. … there is a vertical and horizontal aspect in the built world that adds up in stories literally … A very ordered layering of linear forms that allows the dweller to read through, anticipate, and sense the world they are occupying…" The process of articulating and translating words in our environment - building meaning and rendering association - is something we do everyday subconsciously. Ruark has taken these skills and abstracted our understanding and use of them. In the sentiment of the fluxus artists of the 1960s or the more literal translations of 'visual poetry', where the words form a picture of object they describe, Ruark uses the façade of this house as the page upon which to scribe his musing for perfection. It is a poem for pleasure. It is a poem for the street.
|
1Mb