Extreme singularities

Here, we are speaking in our own name, and about our own reality, from our own perspective, which has been silent for too long. Stuart Hall, and Jacob Sam-La-Rose, break silence.

  

The works of Anna Lascari in her solo exhibition Extreme Singularities move lyrically between cleavages of a desire to display, as if caught in a ceremonial celebration, possibilities and potentialities of a multiplicity of temporal matters outside invested meaning, which are never epic and not at all narrative in their negotiation. Many of the varying materials have been recovered from the artist’s studio. Nothing is abandoned; values are redeemed through the devised ways by which these unfold themselves and their relationship to each other. Strips of PVC transform like doorways that lead to a further layering of knotty conditions where the individual and collective traverse space, as the title of the exhibition suggests; where the parts coalesce into an altered belt of animation when they otherwise seemingly draw apart from the whole, from the full perception of the viewer, and from between the tremors that hold them together.

Sound is integrated in the artist’s works, springing up without reserve in ways that reach out into the surrounding space in which every single object occurs and endures, echoes and overcomes its oddity. A special treatment of each slight slither of one material against another, travels between the individual works in a symphonic synecdoche. A whiff of air through a door or window, the breath of a viewer, the muted slat of blinds rattling, an action, weak or interruptive, triggers the sound that is wavering. The voice contained, awaits crystallization. And each vertical articulation of these very singular parts critiques hierarchies of agency through a rest in counterbalance.

                                                                                         

One of the world’s most widely produced synthetic plastic plays a reoccurring role as a gestural setting for much tension between a manifold of images and movement, sculpture and sound, painterly winks and fragile fragments of impressions. The precarious “bases” whose (im)balances are never detrimental enough to cave-in, in effect, hold resilience. Their emphasized materiality seems to steadily matter and to carry on; their autonomy escapes the authority of representation, in the way that Deleuze and Guattari think about singularity as that which cannot be reduced to representation or in Giorgio Agamben’s view that every whatever-singularity matters whatever it is – it is not subjected to a superior dividing up of things which matter and things which don’t. Every detail is a corresponding feature uplifting all until exhaustion.  

On the verge of tipping their historicity and venerating their ephemerality, Anna Lascari’s self-validating works unfailingly demonstrate a progress departing from narrative, and poising in a state of lasting (dis)integration. Whether a delicate fragment of paraffin wax; a flexible plexi spine raising the reverberating remnants of durability; triangular tips of wood pointing at all directions; an ostensibly collapsing staircase swaying fluid ounces of water; or slant supports whose unsettled and unsettling identity gently swerves us into paradoxical possibilities where pellucidity entails cooperation, these acute fragments within their singularities address, with sensibility, a dynamic that braces prevailing precariousness.         

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Maria Petrides, Independent writer

Anna Lascari's solo show is running from October 24 to December 01, 2018 at a.antonopoulou gallery, Athens