Rebecca Sitar: The Obstinate Muteness Of Things

                                                                   'Casket' (2021)

Manchester-based artist Rebecca Sitar’s recent joint exhibition with Dan Roach, ‘Mudlarks’, was a pleasant reminder that, in a zeitgeist still rather taken by formal hybridity in contemporary art, an unshowy refinement of a practice has its own benefits.

‘Mudlarks’ was the name applied to nineteenth century riverbank scavengers patrolling the intertidal flats of the Thames to unearth objects still carrying a use value. It is also suggestive of the magpie lark of Australian descent which builds nests from mud and twigs, a kind of constructive and functional alchemy not unlike the building site of a painting, itself constructed from stubbornly solid surfaces and painterly muck.

 

The vague, almost recognisable, single objects that dominate Sitar’s paintings either hover in front of surface washes of milky and muted colour or emerge x-ray-like from the quiet ground of the pictures. So, in ‘Under the Skin’, a horizontal twig shape is sharply foregrounded on a background of cool blue-white; whereas ‘Red Velvet In Thin Air’ seems to gather a cloudy orange-pink block of haze from the warm but pale ground of the painting.

 

Enigmatic but intimate, keening towards the mimetic and an elevation of the fragmentary, it is impossible to gauge the scale of the suggested objects; they could be delicately microscopic or as substantial as handleable human artefacts and everyday objects. Rarely do they radiate the aggression of the monumental or the sizeable clutter of a natural landscape.

 

A mnemonic woolliness hovers around them; they feel like the restatement of objects previously forgotten or abandoned, but, as Richard Davey observes in the exhibition catalogue, ones fleetingly sighted in the blurred boundary of peripheral vision.

 

Davey notes that ‘we exist in the ‘here’ – bounded bodies interlocked with time and place, unable to escape the ever-unfolding present of ‘now’’ whilst simultaneously acknowledging that ‘Our memory is a palimpsest, where fragments from times past and the dreams of our unformed future collide with the present moment…. Into a familiar picture of reality in the mind’.1

 

Observations which emphasise a paradoxical truth: although we can never ‘escape the ever-unfolding present of ‘now’’, we never really live, fully, in the ‘now’; our minds being formed from fragmentary snippets of past experiences and dreams interlocking with new sensations to allow us to construct our picture of reality.

 

This introduces significant elements often foregrounded within contemporary painterly practice, Sitar’s included. The thematics of duration and flow.

Duration and flow have been resurrected time and again within critical discourse; the fertile lineage of Bergson via Deleuze and a detour through the photographic and its digital offspring.

 

Organically, paintings carry the potential of being an ontological flattening into a single object-space of the spatial gameplay evidenced in previous historical precedents. This may suggest a mere expansion of the possibilities inherent in an investigation of ‘the painterly’.

 

But it is important to remember the degree to which painting as a technology, as much as painting as a conceptualising discipline, has always simultaneously absorbed and colonised parallel media.

 

If duration and flow are the DNA of twitchy digital pixels and contemporary moving images, they are also, in parallel, discretely hidden and quietly resonate within contemporary painterly practice.

 

That is why it is impossible to extricate a single temporal pace from this admixture of maternal referents within many contemporary paintings. Sitar’s paintings graphically state this sense of layered, contrary fluid perceptual shifts, discretely acknowledging the impurity of painting as a comfortably static and definable practice.

Further, in abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of perception to the work of paint beginning to think at the level of expressive matter. Sitar plays with this, suggestively concerned both with the mechanisms of perception and with painting as a 'memorial' to painting as a practice.

This is very different than the tired constraining stricture of perpetually restaging 'the death of painting' as the paintings here act as a network of becomings and stagnations. Stray matter congealing into the visually apprehendable overlayed with its obverse, a flow of creeping entropy and deterioration.

This balance of contradictions make 'Casket' and its bleached out sugary tones efficiently seductive and needlingly off-putting at one and the same time. Like an overexposed printed photo of a Wayne Thiebaud cake painting.

 

As spectres of material presence, the almost-images pictured in Sitar’s works maintain a subtle discordancy between solidity and visual slippage. The minds’ eye sweeps around them in a predatory circling of the isolated object-events which act as enigmatic and unstable visual bait. The implied objects are haunted by alternative objects; other material possibilities occupying the same space at the same time.

 

Importantly, here images are not just traps for the eye but suggestive pivots towards other possible images.

 

The liminal imaginal spaces of these paintings are often almost interchangeable and, experiencing a grouping of this work, it is interesting to consider the possibility that they actually function as an ongoing serial production of a single work. One in which absence acts as a binding factor.

 

Afterall, on constructing a resemblance, the thing referred to is generally removed. The operations of this work may usefully be viewed as cojoined absences revelling in the obstinate muteness of things.

 

 

1. From ‘Kaleidoscopes of Atomic Shards’ by Richard Davey, an introductory essay to the catalogue ‘Mudlarks: Rebecca Sitar and Dan Roach’, published by University of Worcester, School of Art, 2021

(ISBN:10:9780903607360 and 13:978-0-903607-36-0)

 

 

 

Archives At Play - Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK

 

The impulse to collect, connect and structure things and information, to build an archive, is one which has been tapped by the gallery system for a very long time.

More recently, exhibitions built and staged in galleries have referenced the act and importance of their own archives as material snapshots of the tone of times past; as records of cultural production and the shifting social and ethical prioritising of themes and focus.

It’s both a positive and negative game-plan. An easy and affordable way to regurgitate past presentations and satisfy funding bodies which regard broad, usually politically neutered, gripes about social and economic inequalities, rejigged as entertainment with a moral edge, as presumably wholesome and satisfactory entertainment for the various sub-groups assumed to accurately constitute the viewing public.

Alternatively, it can be a barbed critique of simplistic thematisation as enforced from the political centre, as a complicating and enriching self-flagellation by a representative of that cynical oxymoron the culture industry.

Confusingly, the ‘Archives at Play’ exhibition, about to finish its run at Manchester UK Castlefield Gallery, seems to be both and neither as it takes considerable mental contortions to cello-tape the concept of ‘the archive’ and that of ‘play’ together to satisfy the suggestion of the exhibition title.

The term ‘archive’ is the misdirective mcguffin in the mix.

The exhibition seems more concerned with the possibilities of a productive friction between the playfully subjective arena of the imaginal, with its own opaque structuring systems, and the ideologically grounded structure of gallery display and archival recordings.

Curator Thomas Dukes starts the ball rolling with a display shelf and alcove littered with a range of material reproduced from the gallery’s archive boxes. Records of exhibitions from the gallery’s history, supporting promotional hand-outs, contact sheets of instal images, hand-written and therefore less formal correspondence between artists and Castlefield staff, etc all co-exist on a display shelf and invite visitors to dive into the information as they wish.

It is unclear if the information displayed has been carefully or randomly selected so a binding logic is there to be constructed by the reader / viewer. Which presumably is the point. Alternative perspectives and histories mingling like unstructured fragments of memory: the personal and the institutional fighting and co-mingling.

Most conceptually close to this display, Chester Tenneson's small, squared text paintings address the ‘archive’ aspect of the exhibition title, alternatively, Tenneson's toy-like sculptural collisions of mass-produced objects wrestle with the ‘play’ bit.

The plastic falseness of a bright yellow construction hat topped with a blue propellor (‘Bright Lights from a Giant Wheel’) or a surprisingly large model railway’s terraced house mounted on a bike’s stabilising side wheels (‘That River’s Flowing’) are enjoyably playful re-stagings of an old Surrealist trick. But Tenneson’s strongest works are the familiar text paintings which, over the years, have often been a witty highlight of group and joint exhibitions.

Previously acting as efficient standalone pieces (even when huddled in groups with an overarching title) they work best here as cross reference-able units as the text used has been lifted from the gallery’s archive literature. Tenneson’s signature tone of sarcasm (think Mel Bochner rather than Jenny Holzer) threads through the selection of phrases: ‘The Persistent Theme Of The Transformation Of The Mundane To The Extraordinary’, ‘A Location Which Is Ideally Situated’, ‘A Dance Which Leads To Friends And Potential Lovers’, as well as very Tenneson-esque pronouncements ‘A List Of Contents Which May Vary’ or ‘Parapsychologists, Mediums, Magicians, Sociologists & Ken Russell’. 

Dr Yan Wang Preston’s ‘English Gardens’ growing collection of photographic prints use the elegant, spartan aesthetic of Chinese flower paintings and Victorian pressed flowers. The relative newness to UK soil of the now common selected plants, and their natural thriving, makes obvious metaphorical points about migration and renewal with aesthetically engaging artworks.

The use of actual plant-life and additional chunky curves of shop-new plastic plumbing make up Gregory Herbert’s ‘Entanglement Ways of Being’. Transparent areas and missing piping allow the eye to burrow into the buildings (redirected) circulatory system.

It appears that the relentless push of organic growth is also acting as a physical incarnation of an alternative structuring principle to the ideological underpinnings of the gallery system. In reality, the thing displayed shows the superimposition of a conceptually ‘perceived’ circulatory system onto a necessarily practical system whilst acknowledging that nothing here is actually necessary. The ‘user value’ of art may be the final sideswipe of the work.

Half of the main downstairs Castlefield space is filled with a sizeable installation by Kelly Jayne Jones which continues the knotting together of organising belief systems (inevitably both ideological and social).

The low lighting intimates the muffled greys of twilight. There’s a theatrical mixture of materials; organic rocky lumps and chalk scrawled rectangles of slate, sharp punctuations of spermy white motifs extending into unreadable technical drawing type patterns; a freestanding frame of cheap timber, and both cheaply reflective tin-foil bright moon crescents and projected silvery circular moons.

The overall effect is something between a site of techno-pagan moon worship and a build for a school play. Either about to begin or having just finished.

Accidentally, this seems to loop back to the archive shelf in suggesting that communal mis-readings and mis-rememberings may be as productively constructive as exhuming hidden histories and perspectives from the archives.