Rewind: Elspeth Pratt
Artspeak, Vancouver
In "Doubt," Elspeth Pratts solo show at Artspeak in Vancouver, the patriarchal declarations of both art and architecture were deftly undermined. After spending time with five of her witty, probing and utterly original sculptures, all of which examine our relationship to our built environment, it wasnt a bit surprising to hear that Pratt once considered a career in architecture. Thirteen years ago, she was accepted into one of the countrys leading architectural programs, but then withdrew in a panic. Her sudden realization was that sculpture would be a much more suitable vehicle for her ideas about buildings than buildings themselves.
Not traditional sculpture, mind you, but her own brand of the anti-heroic and anti-monumental, employing the most banal building materials in the most unexpected ways. Pratt has been way ahead of the pack in negotiating a working relationship with Formica, mahogany doorskin, polystyrene insulation and the kind of wire mesh known as hardware cloth, and her use of corrugated cardboard is so distinctive that its almost a signature. The awkwardness of her forms and the lightness of her materials contribute to her works peculiar character. So does the way she constructs and installs her sculpturesoften hanging them on or leaning them against an inside wall rather than erecting them, assertive and free-standing, in the middle of a gallery, park or plaza.
Instability, impermanence and vulnerability are qualities integral to Pratts challenge to notions of gendered space and to her larger questions regarding the social management that occurs in semi-public buildings such as office towers, shopping malls and recreation complexes. Its entirely germane that her banal and quotidian materials should be directed towards a critique of those banal and quotidian spaces. It is their everydayness that blinds us to the power they hold over us, to the social, economic and political control they exercise in our lives. Pratts work asks us to question that control, to doubt.
Her focus in this exhibition was both specific (aspects of buildings designed by Jean Nouvel or Frank Gehry) and general (issues of surveillance, professional hierarchies, cultural colonization). Two works, Adrift (2000) and Escape to Paradise (2001), took on tropical resorts and the architecture of leisure. Adrift is, atypically, a free-standing piece with two separate components. One is a small, organic form subtly carved out of laminated layers of pink polystyrene. It functions as a sort of float or buoy. The other is a taller phallic form, a wobbly and slightly gaping tower, made of hardware cloth. It stands on teetery little legs and is ringed with a kind of float, ledge, or life-preserver, made, again, of polystyrene. The legs (the ends of vertical strands of the wire mesh) are so insubstantial that the tower also seems to be floating, the work drifting away on a sea of moral lassitude and geo-political disengagement.
Escape to Paradise uses Formica counter-top material, patterned to resemble the surface of a swimming pool on a sunny day, and layers of plywood, ingeniously cut to suggest both secluded bays and corporate logos, to address the kind of generic holiday architecture that increasingly clutters the beaches of tropical countries. This wall-mounted sculpture speaks volumes about the North-South divide, about economic hegemony in the form of tourism and about the culture-obliterating ethos of First-World leisure in Third-World countries. Escape is very beautiful, too, very seductiveof that, there can be no doubt.
Summer 2002
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