C103 Review

Ards: John Mathews at Ards Arts Centre

 

John Mathews: projected image from Twist, Trail, Burn; courtesy the artist

 

Staring, trembling, searching for ways to hold tight these effervescent awakenings. The sleeper has awoken. I must try to get to the surface.

In January of 2003 moving images play on three of the four walls of the Ards Arts Centre's Sunburst Gallery. As one enters the darkened gallery the facing screen is a projected video work; the other two screens show large projected slide images. The sound of continually turning carousels accompanies the looped soundtrack playing in the space.

This is the first time that this particular work has been shown in this way, which the artist states is its originally intended format. The imagery and presentation are familiar to viewers aware of John Mathews' previous works, displaying the constant intentionality of vision employed by the artist. This constancy, even earnestness, does not emanate from the conceptualism or process-reflexivity currently prevalent in video work. Instead, characteristically for the artist, the work is beautiful; the experience of it seems all surface and effect.

Beauty is of course not equivalent with production values, but the production of this work is the main way in which its beauty is apparent. The particular crafting of the imagery, its selection and framing, infuses the work with its own controlled production. This impacts on its function, which hovers between apprehension and indication. The former does at times defeat the ultimately sublime function of images and sounds as indicators of the marvellous.

To stay within one's own senses, but to become indifferent to the needs it dictates.

Other technical elements also intrude in this particular installation. While there is occasional fruitful interplay between elements within video and slide imagery, which is aided by its scale - particularly in the echoing of written text - the large size of the slide projections can be at odds with the jewel-like quality of their imagery, and this furthermore creates tensions between the conscious intimacy in the work and the cinematic po(i)se of the video. The sound of slide projectors in motion also unfortunately interrupts the soundtrack of the work, which is a key element in the work effecting its transformative potential.

 

John Mathews: projected image from Twist, Trail, Burn; courtesy the artist

 

Is it amusing or melancholic that the limitations imposed by the technical echo a more fundamental interplay between the achievement of transformation and its frustration throughout the content of the work? There is something appropriate and symmetrical in this relationship between pregnancy and disappointment. The fragments of the world selected and crafted by the artist - framed objects, posed figures, abstraction in natural and constructed forms, scraps of text - are throughout edged with sentimentality and sweetness but also the viewers' own naïve search for a re-envisioning of the world, the undaunted desire to see the world as new and beautiful, not jaded and worn.

this is it

An image of this unequivocal fragment of text spraypainted on a road surface; we of course ask ourselves 'is this it?', but the image and the moment moves on. The work mines this cusp between limitation and transformation, notably in its display of found adolescent graffitied lines from songs which declare trite sentiment while bearing testament also to genuine and unselfconscious yearning. We don't need to note IRA scrawled close by to the words we will be free to discern its jingoistic associations. The work plays on that which we already know and feel; that mundanity infuses our continuing betrothal to the idea of our own freedom some day, somehow - and the hope that this moment, this fragment brings us closer to that unreachable.

There was a Monster at Ravenna in Italy of this kind, in the year 1512.

om lekha

Italicised text is from written and recited elements of the artist's work

John Mathews: Twist, Trail, Burn, Ards Arts Centre, January 2003