OPEN 1 @ Open Eye Gallery
Open 1 marks the start of a new series of annual exhibitions that showcase work and research projects that have been submitted to Open Eye since 2013. Open Eye actually have an ongoing open call for proposals, one of the few galleries I know that do – I’m sure they get some incredible stuff but they must also get so much shit along with it. I remember, in my gallery days, having unofficial exhibitions in the office of the crap that used to get posted in. I’m not proud of it, but it was fun.
Of course Open Eye is only showing the good stuff. The show opens with pastel ice-cream walls displaying 11 prints from Helen Marshall in collaboration with Risang Yuwono. These were made in partnership with the Ketoprak Tobong Kelana Bhakti Budaya, one of the last remaining theatre troupes in Yogyakarta. In Marshall’s images, the performers are captured in staged scenes; two female performers play tug of war in a building site, a lady in sparkling purple stands resolutely on the beach, another bejewelled man at a bus stop. The point is the juxtaposition between traditional, once ubiquitous, Javanese theatre tradition and its increasing marginalisation. Based on shadow and puppet theatre, the Ketoprak has developed into a dance performance that transforms humans into the puppets themselves. The archival photos on Marshall/Yuwono’s Project Tobong website are great and head to YouTube for more contemporary, modernly glitzy, examples.
Next up is documentary photographer Louis Quail‘s series Desk Jobs, which shows employees, sales consultants in Connecticut, property developers in Vietnam, and receptionists in Moscow at their desks. The images capture two key things – the glazed but concentrated expressions of the workers and the environments they inhabit or have, in some cases, tried to make home. Our desks are funny places, sites we often spend more time in than we do at home and both the cosiness of some (dolls, soft toys, photographs) and the austerity of others is interesting and telling. In the same gallery space, but slightly less interesting, were Deborah Kelly’s portraits of families, often mothers and daughters; Sonal Kantaria’s portraits; and Billy Macrae’s G20 Double Takes, which show hands holding photographs of the G20 protests held against the more recent, and calmer, same locations. Although the installation of all is nicely done in the gallery.
Without doubt, the most compelling set of images come from Richard Ross. His series, Juvenile in Justice, charts the stories of those youths who are detained in prisons and reform centres across the USA and the stories are often heartbreaking. Shown as images with a written text from the ‘criminal’ children next to them, you read of young people punished largely by a unfunctioning (or too high functioning) administration – of solitary, confinement, loss and a huge amount of wasted life. This project has a good online presence and it is worth further reading and consideration whether you make it to the exhibition or not.