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