Breaking up and putting back together, reasserting our relationship with what surrounds us, these are all themes which this exhibition aims to confront. A disorientating experience which leads to a reorientation with the quotidian, the everyday, the banal. The specificity and quiddity of words which in literature have been employed to describe and capture objects is here considered as we seek out words and ways to describe what each of the artists confronts us with. The work reflects and parallels the specificity and ‘thingyness’ of objects creating a poetic alignment which ultimately confirms our place in the universe and the role of the viewer which becomes like the sculptor, assembling a network of associations and finally creating new ones, bringing their own recalled experience of objects to the table. We dissemble and assemble, add and take away and come to see the world, even if just for a few moments, through the eyes of another. Whether this is through the deliberate disorientation of the everyday object or the deliberate and pointed appropriation of that object as it is, as art, the work makes us reconsider the environment in which we find ourselves, and consistently pushes at the boundaries of vision and of beauty, and forces us to complete the task the artist has set, to subjectify the objectified.
Press release; To be alert is to be decorative, exhibition curated by Lindsey Hanlon with Sean Edwards, Alhena Katsof, Charlotte Thrane; Ten til Ten; Glasgow; April 2008
Released in 1988, Prince's album Lovesexy was both a commercial and critical failure, its only notoriety originating from its rather suggestive cover. Prince's naked, androgynous body, positioned suggestively next to the erect stamen of a blooming flower, caused a minor controversy upon the album's release. As a result, many Americans were familiar with the album's cover without ever hearing any of the songs. This LP cover forms part of the fifth show at The Hex featuring works by Charlotte Thrane and Anthea Hamilton. In a piece by Thrane, the image of Prince's head is encapsulated within a matching purple drinking glass. Other arrangements in the exhibition employ a similar process of rhyming, connecting a variety of objects through shared surface characteristics of colour, shape, and texture.
The work on show is made of a combination of what was already in the flat and elements from the studio. The subtle confrontation of these two worlds and the confusion that accompanies it requires an attentive, active looking. If a lamp is no longer just a lamp, what is it then? What does the reconfiguration of a space by art actually achieve? The conventional expectation of art being useless is broadly questioned here. Whether something is "useful" or not becomes less important in this context than its existence as a visual thing, and the possibilities created by its connection to other visual things.
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances" writes Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray , and possibly this is a way to think about the work by Thrane and Hamilton. There is a focus on the surface of things, on the skin rather than the flesh of a Prince album, for example. As limited as surfaces are, perhaps, they are often our only guide to the world around us. Ultimately, the show is a straightforward engagement with and scrutiny of what is actually here, whether art or not: images, textures, surfaces; objects, furniture, lights; cakes, bowls, books.Press release, The Hex Presents Charlotte Thrane with Anthea Hamilton, London, March 25-April 8 2007
'Attached to a metal stand, a piece of wood sports a nifty fringe of black plastic. Jammed into one end with bits of yellow, orange and red felt is a bright orange length of corrugated plastic piping; it gesticulates above two plastic buckets and a washing-up bowl stacked on a low trolley. The materials may be value-less, but attention to detail, such as the tinsel decorating the rim of the bowl, transforms Thrane's ensemble from an idle accumulation of junk into an assemblage made with careful intent. [...] The appeal of these sculptures arises, I think, from the way they embrace imperfection - our own and the world's [.]'
Sarah Kent, review of the exhibition Rough Diamond, Time Out, July 27- August 3 2005
'A vibrant and exuberant celebration of materials and processes is deployed as a dynamic foil and counterpoint to interpretation and content. It is this heightened and constant state of contradiction which refuses transparency and resolution, inviting instead repeated, active and renewed encounters with the work.'
From the press release of the exhibition Rough Diamond, Program Gallery, London, 23 June - 6 August 2005