Meshing the Ordinary

Laureline Lê & Dana Saez: installations

Introduction: Alicja Melzacka

30.08.2019 - 08.09.2019

Gravieranstalt , Aachen, DE.

‘Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made of lines’ said Gilles Deleuze in his conversation with Claire Parnet, and today, his words are perhaps worth recalling. In our data-driven times, it seems that everything can be delineated, predicted, and quantified – even selfhood. We become the ceaselessly cruising lines on the GPS tracker, the fluctuating lines that visualise our productivity trends. We live within and according to grids, and our favourite lines are the rapidly increasing diagonals.

In their duo show Meshing the Ordinary, Dana Saez and Laureline Lê propose the notion of a meshwork as an alternative way of conceptualising spatiality and materiality. As opposed to a grid, or a network, a mesh creates no structure, nor hierarchy, but is characterised by flexibility, irregularity, and centerlessness.

The term ‘meshing’ comes from the field of computer-aided design and describes the process of generating three-dimensional models using computational data. But mesh can also be found in many material objects – from a whaler’s net to linen canvas. Sometimes, it spins on the macro-scale, at other times, it is so dense it simulates a solid substance, and it is only upon zooming in that we notice its porousness. This movement of ‘zooming in’ and ‘out’ is encouraged throughout the exhibition, as Dana and Laureline continue to play with the scale in and of their works.

The exhibition itself can be seen as a mesh of relations between the works, their context, and the viewer. It is threaded with multiple intersecting lines, both material and immaterial – the lines outlining works, infrastructure, and architecture of the exhibition, plotting light and shadows and guiding the viewer’s sight and movements. The lines that construct, break down and transgress spatial and visual structures.

A finespun intermediary, the mesh constitutes a particular form of barrier that at the same time divides and connects, obstructs and enables the view. Many works on show also represent this liminal quality, playing with conditions of visibility, rendering immaterial material, or teetering on the brink between representation and abstraction. This quality is particularly pronounced in the work of Laureline Lê, an attentive observer with a sensitivity for details which can be traced back to her background in engraving. Working with installation and sculpture is for her a way of transferring two-dimensional lines into the third dimension. Laureline is equally interested in the processes of making as well as the mechanisms of seeing her works. Many of them play with the optics and mislead the viewer’s eye by manipulating with obstructions and openings, not unlike a mesh. The eye and the body of the observer must be in constant movement to register those subtle, temporary changes. In Out of Sight (2019), the proportion between transparent and opaque surface is reversed; while defining the shape of the ‘window’, the privacy film paradoxically obscures it. What is there to be seen? Once my sight rebounds from the opaque surface, it starts sliding across the glass and registering glimpses of colour, pieces of a broken-up image. I don’t see through the window but I see the space around it and reflected in it.

While most of Laureline’s works on show have something to do with obstructing the view, closing down, and not-showing, her sound installation opens up towards the eponymous Outside (2019). The sound has been recorded through an open window, which we cannot see, but which nonetheless – as the only one – offers us some perspective. The dark, narrow corridor resounds with the distant cry of seagulls, intertwined with moments of apparent silence. I use the words ‘apparent silence’, since Laureline’s work in general challenges such ultimate notions, by raising all sorts of perceptual questions. Can there be  absolute silence? Is something colourless devoid of colour? What exactly means ‘white’?

This last question underpins her work Off-white (2019), a horizontal composition of cardboard panels, painted in different shades of white. Presented on the raw, unembellished wall, the sculptural quality of this work becomes perhaps more striking than initially intended. It could well be a minimalist sculpture in the spirit of Donald Judd, but in my behind-the-scenes communication with Laureline, we couldn’t stop referring to it as ‘the jalousie-work’. And not without a reason since the window is a recurring element in her work. Possibly because of its grid-like structure, it appears as an object suspended between representation and abstraction. In many instances, it breaks away from the regime of geometry, its frame bending, breaking up, or melting away.

Throughout the ages, artists were using different kinds of perspective grids to create realistic representations of the observed world – from the ancient Egyptian canon of proportions to Alberti’s window (again a window!), to Durer’s drawing frame. Seen from this perspective, new digital technologies can be considered a next step, or rather a leap, in this long tradition, enabling representation and (re)production of reality. In those technologies, the static grid has been replaced by a flexible mesh of data points.

Dana Saez makes ingenious use of those tools in Unfolding the medium (2015-2018), a series of works on the interface of sculpture, design, and material research. For this project, she selected examples of left-over building materials of different shapes and textures, which were then digitally scanned, or as she vividly described it, draped in a digital meshwork. In this way, she transformed physical objects into digital drawings, which can be seen at Gravieranstalt. Besides the drawings, Dana presents also a several objects reproduced in ceramics. Strikingly, as is often the case with her projects, what was initially the by-product (the technical drawing used to design the cast) became possibly even more interesting than the result.

Despite the technical description, purporting certain precision, the ‘digital translation process’ – from the material into digital and back to material again – is, in fact, more haphazard than it sounds. This is why, even though Dana’s work develops through reiteration, the outcome differs every time. In Unfolding the medium, she focuses specifically on the objects that suffered deformation as a result of technological error. Those errors, leading to digital ‘mutation’ account for the semi-organic appearance of the pieces. I would be tempted to say that Dana’s work blurs the line between the natural and the artificial if such essentialist notion of ‘nature’ still made sense in a time of dark ecology and the Anthropocene. Our species and its creations are not opposed to- or outside of Nature (with a capital N); we are enmeshed in it. This non-binary perspective eliminates the distance between technology and nature; the blank spot in the eye of the 3D scanning camera feels suddenly all the more human.

Even though it’s the first time ever Dana and Laureline have collaborated, they managed to develop a very mature dialogue. Both artists thrive when working under constraints of site-specificity; as a matter of fact, two of the works on show have this kind of background – Unfolding the Medium was realised at the European Ceramic Work Centre (NL), in close relationship with the site, and Inside was created especially for the current exhibition at Gravieranstalt. In the weeks leading up to the show, the artists have drafted several versions of the installation for the vitrine, involving different constellations of lines stretched between the walls and the floor. The realised proposal, a spatial form whose density increases towards the centre of the room, remotely resembles the twist of the Möbius strip. Seen from the street, it functions as a visual mediator between the inside and the outside. The installation reconciles many contradictory qualities, resulting from the physical challenge of adding volume to a  two-dimensional line. The forces acting on the strings seem dormant, the tension is static, the energy – preserved. Only the presence of the rocks testifies to the ongoing struggle. So much is happening, yet nothing seems to happen.

Text by Alicja Melzacka