Beyond Nowhere
No More Fairytales
‘The work of art was the only means to regain lost time.’
– Marcel Proust
Anyone familiar with Joanna Langford’s previous work knows that her installations always beg a little childhood optimism. But it’s an orphan sentiment in these cynical and perilous times, and Langford addresses very different emotions in her new work, Beyond Nowhere. This installation focuses on three specific aspects of time – the landscape and its changing nature, death and the recording of personal history, and the recreation of space.
At first glance Langford’s delicate cloud forms may seem drifty, but such an interpretation disregards the work’s formal qualities: Beyond Nowhere illuminates the artist’s longstanding obsession with construction of form. Like many artists of her generation, Langford thinks a great deal about architecture and design. Her work has always veered in the direction of magical realism, a minute version of our world rendered in mutated ‘Game of Life’ clay-mation figures. In Beyond Nowhere we move away from this. An armature of grey wire wears white plastic gowns that swell and deflate at fifteen-minute intervals. The shadowed buildings are doodled in delicate relief, the grey skeleton acting as ornamental imprint on the billowing white.
Like all of Langford’s work, Beyond Nowhere builds on the exquisite, wondrous and dreamy. It floats and puffs, dances and beckons. No longer does Langford create dream-like renditions of our world; this installation is busy at work in its own world. She has lost interest in childhood obsessions; she has eliminated the darling in her artistic vocabulary and reached for the architectural sublime. In many ways the quiet, almost sinister nature of childish dreaminess has matured into a stilted wistfulness.
The sparse and spindly skeleton towers, teetering foundations and blank plastic canvas eradicate the last traces of childhood and plasticine. No more cocktail umbrellas and ice cream cones; instead we have a Lee Bul referenced installation that is filled as much with foreboding as with claims to friendliness. Beyond Nowhere engages with the humbleness of its materials, and enchants with the complexity of its motion, its interaction between crowded and empty spaces. Architecture of grey wire surrounds us like skeins of memory, referencing old and forgotten elements of the past made newly strange.
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