NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP

NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP at Heaven Gallery

Gwynne Johnson, Jessica Bardsley, Ashley Thomas

October 18^th, 2013

Gwynne Johnson

Somewhere Beyond Myself I Wait For My Arrival, 2013

The viewer crosses the gallery room, atop the scuffed and splintered wooden floor, beneath the coffered ceiling to confront the white walls, refaced in spite of the old pipelines in odd corners of the space.  The floor is one you would never want to touch, the gallery is made into a creepy place in light of the work—one may really only feel safe looking at the work illuminated by a familiar track lighting situation.  An SAIC media center projector sits atop a dirtied (once white) pedestal, its cord taped crudely to the floor.

One is confronted with Ashley Thomas’ graphite drawing Flowers upon entering the main room of the gallery. The page is filled with gray charcoal.  The charcoal reflects the lighting overhead to reveal a curvature in the installation of the drawing, tacked into the wall by copper nails. The drawing of a vase of flowers appears as a study defined by negative space.  We are given access to the entire paper, and the piece immediately conjures memories of attempting studies from life in a beginning drawing course.  One can picture the artist with a gray-dusted hand rubbing out the highlights with a kneaded eraser.

The image's darkness and shape of the black and white study is mimicked in the shiny black acrylic frame of the nearby hanging Untitled found-image collages.  The frame looks to be unevenly poured resin and has a wavy, shiny surface.  Two black and white printed bouquets stand next to each other against a paint-blackened background, the glossy brush stokes of which are visible in the reflected light.  The clippings appear as studies as well, existing in appropriate size to an encyclopedic reference image.  These three bouquets are de-romanticized , and are presented more as anatomy illustrations that emphasize the floral arrangement.

Attention is moved to the dirtied projector’s occupation of space and its projected video by Jessica Bardsley.  The 16mm film A Past of Plank and Nail moves through a still home and its still life moments, appearing as a record of the space.  The house is Emily Dickinson’s, now a museum that portrays the absence of its inhabitants.  The residual objects evoke a presence, or perhaps a soul that Emily Dickinson speaks of in a poem referenced in the title of Bardsley's work:

The Props assist the House (729)

By Emily Dickinson

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter –

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life –

A Past of Plank and Nail

And slowness – then the scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul –

One comes away with images of the video study like the fireplace and its mantle, the white dress floating in the room, and the cracked toile-covered wall.

These images are carried into the next room of the gallery, across the cracked wood floor, and referenced in viewing the work the viewer finds there.  A row of matte-black square images hang in succession and pull the eye toward their luminous lunar subjects.  Gwynne Johnson's series Milk Moons charts lunar phases in human breast milk, with a matte black abyss of the background akin to the surface of Thomas’ graphite drawings.  A close inspection reveals a surface that looks like finely crushed obsidian, and perhaps calls attention to the mineral nature of the milk.  The photographs are hung frame to frame in a linear fashion, yet some fall slightly out of the arrangement and a bit off kilter.  Though unsubstantiated by intent, the display leads to the subjective sneaking through an attempt at objectivity, the study made personal.

Once again looking around the room, the eyes turn to a grand piano covered in a black tarp, pushed aside toward the window in the gallery.  Night Without Sleep seems to request a solitary viewer, alone in the gallery.  The lighting begs to be dimmed and dramatized, the piano an f-sharp minor scale, and a small spotlight on the white-washed pipes in the corner of the room.