Never Seen and Yet Believed In
3 – 26 July 2021
Except I shall see in his hands the prints of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. […]
Then saith He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust [it] into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
[John 20: 25-27]
Never Seen and Yet Believed In is an exhibition devised collaboratively between Hastings-based artist Scott Robertson and the London duo, Sid & Jim. The show explores our faith in art and its objects by presenting the audience with a number of conspicuous absences. The eminent historian and curator Kirk Varnedoe has distinguished between spiritual faith and the act of faith that takes place in the context of art. With works of art, Varnedoe observes, it is not a faith in absolutes, a faith that we will know something finally, but a faith in our not knowing. It is from things defamiliarized, from the refocus on what we thought we knew, that artists are able to produce new propositions in culture. The misplacements and ellipses of Never Seen and Yet Believed In constitute an acknowledgement of this productive incomprehension.
Scott Robertson‘s The Weight of Another’s Words recognises how an artist’s work can sometimes become unrecoverable from the flurry of written material surrounding it. This renewable sculptural object consists of a scaled-down packing pallet constructed by the artist from reclaimed hardwoods bearing on its surface an updated variety of texts that refer to the artist’s previous work. Although clearly a material contribution to the exhibition, The Weight of Another’s Words attests to the existence of things that aren’t themselves apprehensible in the gallery. Robertson also presents a new text-based light work, Another Bright Idea. With the middle word of the titular phrase blinking on and off as if having developed a fault, Robertson’s work seems to question its own convictions. Inscribed as retinal after-image, though, the viewer retains the word even in the moments of its lost luminescence.
Sid & Jim are fascinated by the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy narrative film and television unquestioningly. The Division of Perspective (Point of View Gun) is a custom foam insert in a discreet grey frame, shaped to accommodate the POV gun from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the movie, the gun has the capability of changing the perspective of a targeted individual – from sceptic to believer, perhaps. However, outside the fictive construct of the film, the case must always be empty because the weapon has never had a substantive existence. The duo also show a pair of matte paintings conceived for unrealised films by Warner Herzog and David Lynch. Matte paintings are employed by filmmakers as backgrounds to composited live action. In Sid & Jim’s Standard Fantasy Setting series, however, the seamless illusionism of the image is disrupted by the surface presence of an irregular black shape, a blank space for the viewer’s own imaginative projections.
Gallery DODO 