Justin Hibbs, Matthew Taylor, Magali Reus,
Curated by Sami Jalili
26 February – 29 March 2009
A recessive psychology pervades. A crisis of confidence and sense of collapse. New spaces are opening up where before the establishment’s bravura denied the possibility of alternative trajectories. The voids that appear like intertemporal portals in the fabric of history here find form in the imposition of idealised yet threatening abstract elements on the landscape of hindsight. This historic narrative is our new territory. Its borders are those imposed by the idiolects of the great movements we rely on to navigate through time. The altars we now build stand testament to these disparate languages, as if cities built upon this new meta-landscape, a topography devoid of terra incognita.
Justin Hibbs’s work has evolved in stages, drawing on the collective memories of modernity, remembered and received. Treating its zones and physical spaces as found, he has reconstituted its often familiar elements in structures more suggestive of an abstracted authority. In these new works, some malignant, some democratized in the painted plane, these spectres grow more threatening. Unreal yet immovable, these parasites occupy the borders that divide fictional narratives and historic interpretation.
Matthew Taylor’s drawings and manipulated images describe a death being constantly replayed and relayed through channels of communication at once emotive and abstract. At the core of these works dwells a torrid void, yet somehow a topography presents itself, a network of interstices through which countless trajectories could be charted. The signage of this hinterland takes its cues from the formal language of modern and postmodern aesthetics. Instead of proposing a course of action, Taylor has chosen instead to re-stage and paraphrase a very present reality.
Magali Reus’s sculpture sits antagonistically between the formality of Minimalism and the consumption of something altogether more rich and unnerving. The imminent sense of activity, and the tension between production and dismantling engenders her work with a dynamism and celebratory sense of humour that belies its rigorous formal aesthetic. The arcs drawn between this historic formalism and the senses of memory and longing in are open and unresolved, left to be consolidated elsewhere, if at all.
Sam Jalili is a writer and curator.
