Ugly Enemies
2021
Solo show at Cibrián, Donostia-San Sebastián
Accompanied with a text by Benedict Singleton
Mixed-media installation and digital video —Wood, PVC strip curtains, spotlights, clay, plastic jewellery, steel platforming, leaves, water, glitter, printed silk
Link to video (4’09”)
Ugly Enemies is a site-specific intervention made of up a complex series of layers, feints, and screening devices. The overlapping layers are arrayed such that movement through the gallery can easily become circular or recursive — you can find yourself lead down or up, inwards or outwards, through and between its fixed scenes, in a manner similar to an amusement ride. Encounters with the work will shift and change depending on your relative position, your point of view, or the time of the day as the light in the room changes with the position of the sun or the intensity of traffic.
The pieces that make up the show collaborate and compete with the architecture of the gallery; they lead visitors through the space and are themselves active agents in this wandering passage. Architectural features such as the stairway, lift mechanisms, protective glass, and fake marble tiles are implicated in the show's functioning. There are steel pathways and hanging entrances on display beside flat images (trompe l’oeil on the floor, plastic jewellery, images applied directly to the walls), red-flickering lights, and a series of small clay sculptures/creatures, partially hidden through the show. These disparate elements compose the installation, but also serve as the set for the filming of El Que Monta Cargas (He Who Rides Loads), a video work that is also on display inside the installation.
In another layer, beyond what is physically present in the gallery, the work enters into correspondence with two texts; one by the artist, titled Sunburns, and the other by the theorist and risk analyst Benedict Singleton, titled Gyropolitics. These texts introduce the animating spirit of the installation, which moves through the space like breath moves in a living body— they discuss the figure of the trap, the practice of trapping, and describe an entire landscape of signs, images, and environments that are designed to betray, to switch their face. All stable relationships are thrown into question. The trap is not put in place to ensnare the viewer; it is something omnipresent, a total environment, and artists, visitors, artworks, and galleries alike are thrust into a space where the distinctions between stable positions blur together.
These connotations locate it in a radically utilitarian space; a machine is something defined by its function; which is not just performed independently (only the simplest and smallest machine does things on its own) but is likely either to be incorporated into larger systems, or to be an integral part of a larger machine, an individual component integrated into larger systems. A machine is always a beginning, it gestures toward vaster formations.
Excerpt from the mentioned essay by Esther Gatón, Sunburns.
Gyres are formed when a cluster of people become locked into patterns of pre-emptive manoeuvre with respect to one another. […] Compel others, instead, to strategise, occupying their minds with attempts to understand where you are leading them, or what you want from them, or what you will do next.
Excerpt from the text written to accompany this show, by Benedict Singleton, Gyropolitics.
There are certainly other layers as well, but their number and depth will be dependent on the visitor, and how far and deeply they are willing to enter into productive collaboration with the trap works and the trap gallery that surrounds them.
