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2007
wall drawing
3.2 x 6 m
Catalyst Arts, Belfast, UK
The exhibition took place at Catalyst Art, an artist-operated project space in Belfast. Also invited were Katrin Plavcak, Lucy Skaer, and James McLardy. The invitation card was based on a photograph by Plavcak showing the beach and sky of Miami. An airplane has sprayed the first letters of an advertising slogan into the sky: ES. The Freudian Id, transformed into a figure of desire, becomes the exhibition’s title.
Whereas the engagement with fences and barricades usually articulates limitations and visibility, the fence is here posited, and breached, as a barrier. A wire mesh fence composed of ten upright-format elements is realized on a wall subdivided by a pilaster. As always in works of this type, the imaginary closure at once implies a dissolution of the wall, here sustained by a few gray ‘clouds’ in the upper part of the wall. The fence elements, though identical in size, are reinforced with bars in different patterns; parts of the frame structures are painted red so that the letters ES-SCAPE, divided into two lines, become legible. In the right-hand side part of the wall, the fence is torn in several places, the wire mesh bent open inward, creating gaps through which the visitor might slip from the real space into that of the image. The grid of the fence, a reflection on the image, is thus semantically integrated into a gesture of escape into the space of the imaginary landscape.