Elsewhere is here . . .
Kate McIntyre and Kirstein McKendry work site specifically on installation-based projects, incorporating architecture and conceptual imagery into their artworks. Both artists work site specifically on installation-based projects, incorporating architecture and conceptual imagery into their artworks. McKendry’s practice involves the use of photography, which greatly informs her three dimensional works that explore the body and its participation in constructed space. Her materials range from glass, fabrics, condoms and currently gelatine. Incorporating a minimal aesthetic, McIntyre looks at the relationship between architectural spaces and personal headspace. She often draws directly onto surfaces and structures, alluding to the effects of the imagination on reality, and works with artificial materials such as polystyrene. Both are looking forward to this show as an opportunity to work with the High Street Project as an Elsewhere place, in which they can explore the internal body in external architectural space.Not Quite As You’d Expect -Margaret Duncan, The Press, 15th June 2005.
It appears minimalism is back. It has certainly made a huge comeback in design and architecture in the past decade, and no it is distinctly visible within contemporary art practice. In particular, the two students whose work is exhibited at the High Street Project are taking formalist logic to a new echelon in their Elsewhere exhibition. Both of these artists trap the viewers into a type of surrealistic vision, deploying their particular mediums to mimic something other then what the viewer first anticipates. A minimalist composition in the form of a giant grid that has a specific reference to an architectural feature of the gallery space will stimulate and challenge viewers’ initial reading of Kate McIntyre’s work. At first glance, what appears to be a huge wire framework suspends in mid-air is actually a wall of Perspex. Rectangular-tile shapes have been drawn onto the Perspex to mirror the tiled wall behind the work. The artist employs the grid as an instantly readable signal of openendness, the opposite of what a solid wall normally defines. While also drawing attention to what was probably once a modern architectural feature, a solid wall of white, brick-shaped tiles has long since receded into banality of a typical all-white gallery environment.
Similarly, the work by Kirstein McKendry is equally austere and minimalist. She probes the seductive possibilities of shape, finish and colour in her works, while also emphasising texture, surface and lighting. At first, the simple glossy-brown shapes perched atop the white pillars, resemble a hard glossy construction that Brancusi or Hepworth might create to evoke a bird form. However, as you venture past, the forms tremble and wobble, disclosing the fact that they have been constructed from a blobby, soft brown substance, contrary to first impressions. The delicacy of ideas in this work is only matched by the delicate nature of the materials the sculptor had to play with, but I shan’t reveal what these are because it would spoil the fun.
