Cerith Wyn Evans: ”Everyone’s gone to the movies, now we’re alone at last…”

14 Apr—22 May 2010
white cube Mason’s Yard

“Rinsed with mercury / Throughout to this bespattered / Fruit of reflection, rife / With‚Ķ distortion / (Each other, clouds and trees). What made a mirror flout its flat convention? / Surfacing as a solid‚Ķ / And what was the sensation / When stars alone like bees / Crawled numbly over it?…”

The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill

White Cube Mason’s Yard was pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Cerith Wyn Evans. Taking its title from a song by Steely Dan, ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Movies’ (1975), Wyn Evans created two major installations that transformed the gallery spaces, engaging the viewer through the interaction of light, sound and reflection.

Suspended in the ground floor gallery was ‘C=O=N=S=T=E=L=L=A=T=I=O=N (I call your image to mind)’ a polyphonic sound mobile adapted from a series of ‘audio spotlights’ by the American holosonic inventor Joseph Pompei. Suspended in tiers, sixteen mirrored discs gently rotate in mid-air, transmitting directional, ultra-sonic beams of sound. This consists of a multi-layered soundtrack or sound collage created by Wyn Evans using various audio sources amongst which are his own piano arrangements and field recordings gathered by the Lovell radio telescope in Jodrell Bank. These constantly shifting bursts of audio disorientate the viewer as the polished ‘mirror-speakers’ reflect and deflect the sound off the surrounding walls, creating a phenomenological experience that can neither be shared nor repeated. In the stairwell, Wyn Evans has placed a white neon sculpture titled ‘Subtitle’, which could be read when reflected on the adjacent glass window, interrupting the view to outside. The neon spells out the phrase ‘Thoughts unsaid now forgotten‚Ķ’, occasioning a cognitive slippage whilst, at the same time prompting us to recollect.

In the lower ground floor space Wyn Evans created a spectacular installation of light columns entitled ‘S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E (‘Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive’s overspill‚Ķ’)’ that references the former electricity sub-station which stood on the site now occupied by the gallery. This soaring infrastructure consists of seven columns that reach over five metres high, and which are built out of drums of tubular light bulbs, stacked in varying lengths and diameters. The layout, while following no apparent guiding rule creates its own order, intuitively informed by principals of spatial balance that the artist has encountered in Japanese rock gardens, galactic alignment and site groupings of stars in astrophotography. Yet here, the transparency of these vertiginous flutes, defined by flecked-wire filaments that run through their centre, appear to hide nothing. Intermittently the columns surge to a blinding brightness, then gradually fade back down to black, channeling an incandescent sense of breath and ethereality.

In the small adjoining gallery Wyn Evans hung a series of twenty-two framed works on paper, titled ‘F=R=E=S=H=W=I=D=O=W’, that references a poem by Stephane Mallarm√© titled ‘Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance), which was published posthumously in 1914. The poem was reprinted in 1969 by Marcel Broodthaers who described it as an ‘image’ after having blocked out the various typefaces and arrangement of words using black bars. Wyn Evans takes this a process a step further by framing each page of the poem, both recto and verso, like a series of intervals, glazed on both sides. Every line of the poem has now been cut away leaving a composition of interstitial gaps on the gallery wall – framing the materiality of the already framed ‘white cube’.

The Artist would like to thank Dr Tim O’Brien of the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics for their support and assistance.

A fully illustrated catalogue, including an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist, will accompany the exhibition.

Cerith Wyn Evans lives and works in London. In 2003, he represented Wales in the 50th Venice Biennale and has participated in the 9th International Istanbul Biennial (2005), Yokohama Triennale (2008) and will be in the forthcoming Aichi Triennale this summer (2010). Last year, he collaborated with Florian Hecker and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary on ‘No night No day’ at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). He also collaborated with Throbbing Gristle on a major visual and audio installation titled A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N which was exhibited at both the Yokohama Triennale and the Tramway, Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Graz (2005), Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris (2006), MUSAC, Leon (2008), Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2009) and Tramway, Glasgow (2009).

Dave is working on images sent very recently from this gigantic telescope Herschel. The world of astronomers is completely fascinated by those image of galaxies that can tell about star formations and the beginning of the universe.

When in the late 50s and 60s the first satellites and space ships were shot into outer space the public was amazed and as part of the space race these technological firsts always also had repercussions on politics and essentially on the cultural world.

Today those “images” appear to be only discussed in very specialist circles and the fascination is shared in very remote (architecturally little glamorous environments – I spare you the images Dave sent from control rooms). I had in mind the American exhibition in Moscow of 1959 when Charles and Ray Eames presented images from outer space and arial views from the USA to the Moscow audience. Buckminster Fuller’s dome and the exhibition in the interior was a spectacle of Cold War propaganda, but there was also an incredible fascination with those new views (not only a single perspective) and technological advances. Can we communicate some of this fascination about the images from Herschel to an audience in a venue such as venice? I assume there will be a whole lot of conflicts appearing about the use of those images and hopefully “Life” research findings in a public space.

The idea of the situation room, installed and built (or at least discussed) in Venice, is to “let the scientists” not only to present their work, but to make this a three months station for their work. The artist and the architect will develop the interface for this prototype communication room. I imagine the space as a very technical discussion forum among scientists – a discussion that in its remoteness and methodology might appear suddenly as very similar to creative practices. The Eames, Ken Adams or the control room in Avatar might be examples to be discussed and reflected upon in the design of the situation room.

The relation to Thermal Energy is that Herschel’s images are actually created through infrared measurements. So thermal energy is transformed into data in the form of an image.