Monochrome Passage
Installation, 2007
Mdf, emulsion paint
Monochrome Passage comprises two ‘paintings’ in two adjacent spaces, separated by a dividing wall. The work outwardly manifests as four blocks of monochrome colour, two of which are square (80 x 80 cm and 24 x 24 cm) and two rectangular (80 x 240 cm and 24 x 72 cm). These ‘paintings’ are connected by an internal stepped passage, just 8 cm wide, the height of which reduces from 80 cm to 24 cm. The positioning on the wall enables a viewer to peer from one space to the other, an activity that unwittingly draws the beholder into the work’s content. It is only through such an intimate stance, physically pressed against the wall, that the viewer grasps the spatial relationship between the two spaces. As such, what initially appears as separated artworks now registers as one continuous folded form, in effect an unbroken
‘frame’ belonging to both the work’s outer and inner apparatus. The rationality of the work’s outward proportions, which uses simple whole number proportions, is sharply contrasted with the essential irrationality of the passage, with its disconcerting ambiguity of scale and exclusion of the external beholder. The openings, flush with the wall, therefore constitute a sculptural equivalent of a projection plane, where two realities are juxtaposed. The work hovers between being a ‘painting’ (or two ‘paintings’) and a ‘sculptural object’, but one that is determined solely by its internal rather than external form. In so doing, it implies two distinct modes of viewing.