RUTH BUCHANAN - PUT A CURVE, AN ARCH RIGHT THROUGH IT / September 8 - November 3, 2012
Opening: September 7, 2012, 6-9 pm
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“Put a curve, an arch right through it” is a preface to the artist’s book “The weather, a building” that figures three intersections through specific points in the history of the State Library of Berlin. Matter is made of three points in time when the institution itself was subject to its own kind of splitting; the doubling from its original home on Unter den Linden to Potsdamer Straße, the temporary evacuation of its contents and the interior design of this new building. Intersections, perhaps, or dissections that are also interactions. Which is to say that this exhibition, or a dissected library (this one), might be read as an occupied allegory, an allegory measured.
Allegory is a thing of figures. A simultaneous preservation and evacuation, where the two depend upon each other. The past is collapsed into the present through figures that stand in for it, or something, and this figuring effects a direct address. That is, a message is conveyed, the figure’s purpose is to be read, it operates like a vessel, a hollow form or even a structure. A photograph or a library are allegorical. But whereas in every allegory there is also something like the aesthetics of disintegration (which is why it is often associated with Robert Smithson’s ideas about entropy, a process or an inevitable spiral of irreversible decline into a world of samenesses) instead, the works here and our relationships to them, are a collection of precise distinctions, the marking of separations that rework allegory into a definite, material, non-entropic model.
A building without the contents that usually define it, occupied, is both, suddenly, an anywhere and somewhere particular. Its measuring is a radial pause, the map and location of a heightened state of observation, a reading of the act of reading. It reverses nothing, but brings together language, structures, signs, objects, images and the forces that act upon them (that is, perception) as equal components to be known as such only in and by their specific constellation, in the moment at which they are seen, in time, of time. Not subjects of disintegration, but as (and by) subjects otherwise constituted by the multiplicity of specifically evacuated objects.
So, then, if the preface for a book happened in a room (this room) and asked: What is material? Could it be this? Could it be the evacuation of a pictured hand. A building. A curtain. Shadow. Arrangement. The breeze. Geometry. Light. A body, obstacle, that seen. The seeing, or heard and hearing. The colour of something. Something spoken. The named and names changed, measuring measures, blinked. This hand thrown by a shadow. Folds. The shadow thrown by a page. The page known. And so on, but provisionally. The direct address of a looking away, already looked away. In time, cut through, changed and measured, because. A change of scenery on the open stage, a determined state, the stage fixed. Renovating us in public. Then it would be known, for a moment.
Ian White
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Using methods and media such as sculpture, photography, text, video, performance, sound and graphics, Ruth Buchanan constructs both literary and built spaces that investigate the parameters of artistic action. Often these speculations depart from ‘meetings with meaning'. These ‘meetings’ imply working intensely with, for example, an architectural location, archival collection or production format associated with a particular figure or scenario. In Buchanan’s work encounters turn into objects: historical narratives are manoeuvred into spatial propositions and situated words.
Born in 1980, New Zealand Ruth Buchanan studied Fine Arts in Auckland and Rotterdam and currently lives in Berlin. Recently she has participated in exhibitions and projects at, amongst others, the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Grazer Kunstverein, Tate Modern, Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Showroom and Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory.
Ruth Buchanan
Cast a light across it
2012
chiffon curtain, rope, suspension connection
210 cm x 500 cm
Ruth Buchanan
Furniture, Plan, Rival Brain
2012
fine art inkjet print on alu-diabond (framed)
63 cm x 44 cm x 3,5 cm (framed)
Installation View
Ruth Buchanan
Furniture, Plan, Rival Brain
2012
fine art inkjet print on alu-diabond (framed)
63 cm x 44 cmx 3,5 cm (framed)
Detail View
Ruth Buchanan
Put a curve, an arch right through it
2012
audio on headphones (±8’00” loop), 2 x chairs from artists home
variable dimensions
Ruth Buchanan
Ostensibility
2010
coated MDF, powder-coated steel legs
240 cm x 360 cm x 80 cm
Ruth Buchanan
Tilt
2010
16mm film transferred to DV, colour/no sound, 3’00” loop
variable dimensions
Ruth Buchanan
An exterior, an interior, a surface
2012
customised table with plexi-glass vitrine, hand latch - hooked rug, papier mache, text on card
175 cm x 75 cm x 85 cm
Ruth Buchanan
An exterior, an interior, a surface
2012
customised table with plexi-glass vitrine, hand latch - hooked rug, papier mache, text on card
175 cm x 75 cm x 85 cm
Detail View
Ruth Buchanan
An image of a solid
35mm slide show, 13’00”, 80 slides (6 colours)
variable dimensions
Ruth Buchanan
An exterior, an interior, a surface
2012
customised table with plexi-glass vitrine, hand latch - hooked rug, papier mache, text on card
175 cm x 75 cm x 85 cm