INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Chloë Steele
Charles Danby reviews the work of Chloë Steele and considers the role of artist-curator duo Day and Gluckman whose notable track record continues throughout 2008-09 with a programme of five exhibitions for the law firm Collyer Bristow LLP.
Reviewed by: Charles Danby
While collaborative partnerships pervade all aspects of the contemporary art world they are less often found within the arena of curatorial practice. Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman both worked independently across the arts sector before establishing a formal working partnership in 2000. In conjunction with this, Day was the Director of Arts Training at Space Studios in east London until 2005, and continues to lecture on issues of professional practice and cross sector development. Gluckman, nine years her junior, graduated from Edinburgh and has since completed an MA in curating at the Royal College of Art. Their divergent backgrounds have enabled them to develop projects across public and private sectors, and it is discrepancies as much as similarities that have been decisive in shaping the structure of their collaboration. Both women have families, and working together has enabled Day and Gluckman to work and develop projects during periods when individually it might not have been possible. Turning discrepancies into strengths, Day and Gluckman explain that the nine years between them has also been beneficial, allowing each to bring a different network of contacts and associates to their projects.
The pair’s most recent curatorial venture has seen them enter into partnership with leading London law firm Collyer Bristow. Based in Bedford Row close to the Sir John Soane’s Museum, Collyer Bristow have fostered a long standing relationship with contemporary art, and their partnership with Day and Gluckman is the latest phase of this. It will see the pair curate a series of six exhibitions within the firm’s recently renovated offices. The second of these featured the work of Chloë Steele, a graduate of the Slade. Centred in drawing and painting, Steele’s practice stretches across media and includes sculptural and printed elements. The works draw on indeterminate forms aligned to, but not necessarily belonging to, the landscape.
The proposition of landscape was immediately evident through the large-scale work Yellow Painting (2007) to the left of the entrance. Here a ramp created a deep-set ledge or platform on which the painting was propped, and at its base were a series of small rock-like objects, Rocks (2008). From a distance these constructions appeared like lumps of flint or charcoal, but on close inspection they revealed themselves to be made from paper thin, cut slices of papier-mâché. Varying in size and colouration these sliced works counterbalanced the geological with the anthropological, mediating the layered sediment of natural strata with the social layering of the consumer-based magazine pages used in their manufacture. In contrast to this controlled order, Yellow Painting depicted an expansive yellow ground cut and agitated by a series of expressive strokes marked horizontally across its surface. The proximity of the two works provoked a playfully perceptive reading of the landscape.
To the right were a series of small-scale works, drawings and prints that proposed through marginal figuration an expectation of the landscape, activated, like these previous works, through a sidestepping of narrative construct. A series of etched works depicted indeterminate upright forms, column- or mound-like. These detailed a series of pictorial spaces that held affinity with both manmade and naturally occurring aspects of the environment. It was across these lines of considered formlessness that Steele’s work presented itself as effortlessly coherent, and it was here in the works’ adoption of non-narrative points of encounter, that forms and marks replicated across media became insightful and playful as echoes and repetitions. The intensive yellow of the large painting reverberated through other works, and as a colour it held privileged rank, collectively underpinning the structure and sentiment of the work, enforcing its visual articulation and non-linear codes.
The extensive exhibiting space at Collyer Bristow enabled Day and Gluckman to present a large body of work, but the intimate and slight nature of Steele’s practice was not necessarily best served by this outcome. Three-Part Whole (2008) was a painting of beautiful curiosity: small in scale it opened up a central vestige via a yellow bell-jar like form that remained encased on either side by a dense corporation of foliage. Elsewhere, Rosebud (2006) and Bush (2006), two equivalent works, both gouache on paper, poetically informed the space between narrative construct and formlessness. There is a quiet individuality to Steele’s work and the presence of so many works exposed the precarious nature of this. The relationship between works is reliant on the transposition of their internal devices of material, mark and surface, and here between so many works those subtleties became disconnected and uncertain.
Day and Gluckman have embarked on a challenging task and have created through their partnership a significant platform for contemporary artists. They have reconfigured Collyer Bristow’s attachment to, and understanding of contemporary practice, and the success of their work is best described in their own words: “...It’s about engagement; we wanted to make it easier for people to have a dialogue around work. The gallery space is where people find themselves before and after meetings. The artworks become part of their conversations, part of what they think about.”
Collyer Bristow Gallery, London
17 April – 25 June
Writer detail:
Charles Danby
charles.danby@gmail.com |
www.charliedanby.co.uk
Venue detail:
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