3 Exhibitions @ MOP

Overview

One wall of the MOP gallery is given over to Alex Wisser’s collection of large-scale photographs, titled Blank Canvas. Both moving and hypnotic, the photographs depict the interiors of homes that have been lived in for more than 30 years, taken on the day of their sale by auction. Corners, doorways, frames, hallways, mirrors — all transform into eyes and mouths, opening and swallowing the viewer into these alternative lives. The viewer cannot help but be seduced into imagining the stories behind these rooms and homes. The photographs, beautifully framed and puckered with light, meditate on the ephemeral nature of the spaces we all choose to exist within and the affection that can be contained in simple objects. The photographs concertina past, present and future. The houses are spaces full of ghosts and longing.

In the Brown Council’s Group Work, three names are written in chalk on three chalk boards. The viewer is invited into the memories of the artists who, each morning before the gallery opens, recall momentous events and influential people in their lives in relation to love, sex and death. These names or phrases are then written onto the blackboards and then written over, and over, and over.

Dara Gill’s In Action, Inaction really grew on me over the time I spent in the gallery. It draws you in, as if you’re an actor just cast in a Jean Cocteau film. You are drawn into a world with shades of grey, piles of rubble, flashing signs and lists of conditions. The work is made up of three interactive areas that the viewer is invited into. The first holds two screens, which flash ‘NOW’ to indicate the four births that occur every second and the two deaths that occur every second. The main wall hosts an interactive survey on the notions of modern, urban anxiety, where you are asked to move a piece of rubble into a pile marked ‘YES’ or ‘NO’. The third wall is filled with identical, blank, Kafka-esque ‘To Do’ lists. I find it hard to disengage from the work and the ideas Gill creates. It’s simultaneously meditative and disturbing. As I leave a girl walks in and sits in the middle of the concrete floor, ‘NOW’ pulsing silently above her head.

Image: Alex Wisser, Blank Canvas, 2011