VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE, PATTERNS AND ARCHITECTURE

31 May – 16 June 2012

Sally Tape

Sally Tape’s Voyeuristic Pleasure, Patterns and Architecture explores memory and self through the prism of construction and industrial process. The memories of printers and discarded film – fragments of structure and place. Tape builds these snippets of memory into wall mounted works, objects that both inhabit and extend beyond the gallery wall. Fleeting construction and slowly blooming pattern combine, transporting the viewer through both temporal and emotional space.

TO GIVE ALL OF THESE AWAY WOULD BE LIKE SPOILING A FILM, SO I’LL MENTION JUST ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MOMENTS

A section of a moment in time, lost forever. Taken and discarded by an industrial process. Anonymous memories, converted into formal reduction that is the product of condensed reference to the urban world. Collecting the remnant strips from photo-printing machinery; collecting snippets of memory that are then constructed and painted into a formal image.

The subjects within the paintings are patterns and structures designed from the collected photograph strips; they collate as a formalist arrangement. The juxtaposition of structures and patterns creates an intense edifice. The biomorphic structures and patterns wrap around each box and obscure the forgotten strips discarded from the printing and slicing process of machinery. The structures and patterns are extrapolated from vision of the world, fragments of architecture witnessed in a split second as travelling through the built up environment. The images represent a vision that is flattened, a new horizon line reflective of screen culture.

‘While the topical City was once constructed around the gate and the port the teletopical meta city is now reconstructed around the window and the teleport, that is to say the screen and the time slot.’2

The Paintings themselves have been created on a small and intimate scale further referencing the nature of personal memory and the self within architecture. The structures of the works are representative of object as the image wraps itself around the much deeper than usual frame, these boxed works create a space that goes beyond the surface of a canvas. They encourage the viewer to travel along them as they sit in formation hung in a straight line on the gallery wall, each side of the frames just as inviting as the flat surface in the front.

Given the time it takes to produce a painting, to use the term one of my favourite moments is one of many moments, but with reference to these works a moment is perhaps the visual snapshot of the whole image. The patterns are a moment seen from a tram or car moving through the architectural landscape of a city, the strips are personal moments discarded from a snapshot taken with a camera.

There are many favourite moments within the paintings themselves that I could mention, but I will just mention one… gloss black, so sleek and glossy, meets a strip of blue/black where the prevailing colour is ultramarine blue so deep that it could be almost black. The two colours within the painting sit side by side more or less one colour, moving through the space past the painting it is the light that will help the eye differentiate between the two. The subtler moments within the paintings are the most intriguing and take these works beyond just structure and colour.

1 CHEN, Irene. ‘New, New Museum’ frieze issue 111, Nov-Dec 2007.
2 VIRILIO, Paul. ‘Open Sky’page 26. Verso, London 1997