No One Sees The Barn

Press release

Outpost
2007

Preview: Thursday 1 November 2007, 6 – 9pm
On view: 2 – 21 November 2007
12noon to 6pm daily

No One Sees The Barn

OUTPOST is pleased to present new work by Jo Addison.

Addison will show several small sculptures, which will be installed within the exhibition space. In most cases the work will be supported by the walls of the gallery – a minimally engineered arm holds a work out from the periphery of the space – another sculpture is embedded in the paint, plaster and wood that covers the gallery masonry. The work occupies these spaces in front and behind walls with modesty; any figuration is deliberately slight and the closest we get to showmanship within this body of work are flashing LEDs imitating distant lights at night and a whirring re-cycled motor which turns a rickety turntable. In the case of the latter, the movement is important: in association with a miniature cardboard totem stuck to the turntable top, it signifies a roadside moving past us.

Reflecting on the turntable piece entitled “Services” one is aware of Addison’s experimentation with what we might call positive and negative images and their relation. A cardboard turntable is transformed into a desolate landscape or perhaps we should say an empty landscape. How do you show the landscape that surrounds a motorway at night – a scene which yields no information bar the colours and blurring semiotics of signposts as they pass in the periphery of the car’s headlights? The artist provides a response; a visibly empty scene is substitute for the invisibility of the countryside at night. The movement, the signpost and the lack of anything else is the working of this piece.

Information comes to us sparingly in all the works intended for exhibition. Addison expresses something uncanny about the appearance of a supermarket sign over a nocturnal tree line. Although it is man made; pertaining to be civilised, it is not so much comforting as it is foreboding. The sign marks a supermarket complex; possibly a retail park, the type of site along with service stations and picnic clearings that can be found dotted along stretches of countryside that follow motorways and A-roads. On these sites locality means very little: we shop/rest/dine amongst unfamiliar faces in an unfamiliar place, which is made to seem familiar. These points of respite on a long journey appear in the distance, for example over treetops. However they are the not the destinations we aim for, often just single manned, 24hr outposts that we trade with through a letter box sized opening in a window.

Jo Addison lives and works in London. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and NSAD. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of the Arts London, Kingston University and RCA.

For more information please contact Lawrence Leaman – lawrence@norwichoutpost.org or on 07817 743969

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