Richard Forster | Ruth Claxton @ Ingleby Gallery
On the floor of the Ingleby's Gallery 2 lies a spunk-like trail of mother of pearl droplets inset into the boards. This remnant of the inaugural exhibition, a fragment of Susan Collis’s subtly entrancing show of tiny interventions in semi-precious stones, lends the new space a sense of continuity, suggesting the notion that this is the beginning of a history.
The second exhibition for Ingleby #2 features the work of Ruth Claxton downstairs, and Richard Forster upstairs. Claxton works with and into colour postcards of old master paintings, precisely incising the surfaces along the lines of the gaze, pulling up the incised strips and manipulating them to make the 2D become 3D, leaving exposed the raw blank paper below.
Upon the Postcard (Portrait of a Boy), the gaze rises up from the paper, lines tangling and twisting to tail, comet-like, behind him. In Postcard (Peace and Plenty Binding the Arrows of War) the gazes of the different characters interlock, the exposed paper shooting down to an intersection as the top layer remnants curl up and over the eyes in a seeming parody of vast, drag queen false eyelashes.
The gaze is a fundamental issue in the study of art and of art history, and indeed in the study of film. Its study traces the power relations between viewer and viewed, subject and object. It is frequently, largely, a gendered discourse, in the sense that the traditional power balance lay in the ready-female-as-object, appreciative-male-as-viewer/observer. Witness the furore surrounding the brazenly returned gaze of Manet’s Olympia to see evidence of the power of the inversed objectification. Claxton’s work deals with the notion of the gaze in an investigative yet playful manner, documenting the routes and relations of the lines of sight within the canvases, then manipulating their remnants to render the lines fantastical tiny sculptures, transforming the subject of dry academic discourse into something irreverent and fun.
Upstairs, Richard Forster’s oak-framed pencil drawings punctuate the walls. Executed around Scotland’s coastlines between June and September of this year, Forster’s meticulous drawings document close-up after close-up of the tide line licking the sand of the shore, trails of surf and foam advancing and retreating in repeated freeze frames. The act of drawing renders the ephemeral permanent, and magnifies its importance in the patience of the viewer. The initial reaction is one of slight ennui, however closer inspection seduces, the act of looking at snapshot following snapshot having a lulling effect rather like that of watching the real surf advance and retreat, advance and retreat. The scope of the frame seems to change, to zoom in and out, creating the impression that we are physically inhabiting the tableaux, ourselves advancing and retreating, stepping back, surveying the scene. In some frames the image pans out to reveal both sea and sky, a glimpse of light through stormy cloud providing a moment of radiance, a metaphorical chorus of angels above the ebb and flow of the sea. The 45-piece strong series ends with a close-up of a breaking wave, the imagined CRASH providing a culmination which lends narrative and pace to the preceding frames.
The freeze-frame, quasi filmic qualities of the work are aided and abetted by the hum of construction work which inhabits the redeveloping building, recalling the clatter of an elderly projector. The space itself throws up interesting dialogues, the white calm and ponderous examinations of nature becoming more oasis-like as a glance out the window reveals the industrial girders of the back end of Waverley.
In all, the current exhibitions offer a touch of solace, a celebration of looking, time, intricacy. The space itself is a flash of calm, its position bordering on the madness of commuter central emphasising the fact that this is a place to pause, draw breath, and focus on the subtlety offered by the senses.