Graham Gussin: Forsakenfocusvertigoprediction

7 March 2014 - 12 April 2014

Kelvin: The night is a blessed time here.  Somehow it reminds me of the earth. 

Snaut: You can also tie strips of paper to the air vents.  At night you’ll think you’re hearing leaves rustle in the dark. 

-Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972

Gussin’s works revisit nostalgic, imaginative leaps found in literature and film, pointing to ideological questions and hypothetical utopias, offering ideas and questions relating to contemporary art’s constant negotiation with its modernist legacies.  He attempts to build a sense of place through a collision of ideas found in the recent past and implied possible futures. 

In Bloom features three large sculptures situated within the open exhibition space, scaled just beyond human size.  Derived from the truncated rhombohedron of Dürer’s Melencolia, Gussin’s wooden structures share the enigma of the original – the meaning and significance of which has been debated by art historians, philosophers and mathematicians for centuries.  Gussin’s reworking can be imagined as a pod, its cargo released like a pollen or seed, but it is for the viewer to encounter variants of a form that may be infinitely reconfigured. 

The artist mediates the iconography of science fiction through the legacy of minimalist art, linking ideas of formal sculpture with futuristic, prospective shapes.  Gussin returns to this trope not only to signal futuristic scenarios, but as a way of critiquing historical forms.  It is important that his objects resemble the familiar forms of modernist sculpture, but equally that their presence in the installation should retain some sense of the uncanny or the inexplicable, as if they have ‘landed’ out of nowhere. 

The structures imply a landscape or place which is full of imminence and possibility.  The human scale suggests some visionary mode of transport and delivery, but they remain strange and alien as the viewer encounters and moves around them. 

Other works in the exhibition suggest a materialisation of melancholy or may point towards elevated states of being.  This mood is explored in one of Gussin’s series of Spinners.  Major Gig is an arrangement of vinyl record covers ranging from electronic trance to the Easy Rider soundtrack, which turn like Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, installed over a background of posters. 

Contraption, an animated suspended bricolage of a wind chime connected to a distortion unit is tuned to the first bar of Masters of the Universe from Hawkwind’s seminal album, In Search of Space (1971). 

An almost inaudible rustling sound alerts the viewer to When the Night Comes, a subtle intervention into the gallery’s structure, in the form of a ventilation grille, alluding to Tarkovsky’s Solaris. ( The film was made at the same time as the Hawkwind album.) 

A four-metre neon horizon line drawn out in The Information is derived from a single line describing the sky in the frontispiece illustration from William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). 

Graham Gussin works in a wide range of media, including texts, drawings, film, video, sound and installation, to explore the perception of time, space and scale, where the realm of the imagination may be seen to spill over into reality.  His works frequently appropriate and manipulate images and literary narratives taken from art history, popular culture and cinema. 

Graham Gussin was born in 1960.  He lives and works in London.  He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Tate, Ikon and Chisenhale.  His work was most recently subject of a survey at Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. 

Kelvin: The night is a blessed time here.  Somehow it reminds me of the earth. 

Snaut: You can also tie strips of paper to the air vents.  At night you’ll think you’re hearing leaves rustle in the dark. 

-Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972

Gussin’s works revisit nostalgic, imaginative leaps found in literature and film, pointing to ideological questions and hypothetical utopias, offering ideas and questions relating to contemporary art’s constant negotiation with its modernist legacies.  He attempts to build a sense of place through a collision of ideas found in the recent past and implied possible futures. 

In Bloom features three large sculptures situated within the open exhibition space, scaled just beyond human size.  Derived from the truncated rhombohedron of Dürer’s Melencolia, Gussin’s wooden structures share the enigma of the original – the meaning and significance of which has been debated by art historians, philosophers and mathematicians for centuries.  Gussin’s reworking can be imagined as a pod, its cargo released like a pollen or seed, but it is for the viewer to encounter variants of a form that may be infinitely reconfigured. 

The artist mediates the iconography of science fiction through the legacy of minimalist art, linking ideas of formal sculpture with futuristic, prospective shapes.  Gussin returns to this trope not only to signal futuristic scenarios, but as a way of critiquing historical forms.  It is important that his objects resemble the familiar forms of modernist sculpture, but equally that their presence in the installation should retain some sense of the uncanny or the inexplicable, as if they have ‘landed’ out of nowhere. 

The structures imply a landscape or place which is full of imminence and possibility.  The human scale suggests some visionary mode of transport and delivery, but they remain strange and alien as the viewer encounters and moves around them. 

Other works in the exhibition suggest a materialisation of melancholy or may point towards elevated states of being.  This mood is explored in one of Gussin’s series of Spinners.  Major Gig is an arrangement of vinyl record covers ranging from electronic trance to the Easy Rider soundtrack, which turn like Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, installed over a background of posters. 

Contraption, an animated suspended bricolage of a wind chime connected to a distortion unit is tuned to the first bar of Masters of the Universe from Hawkwind’s seminal album, In Search of Space (1971). 

An almost inaudible rustling sound alerts the viewer to When the Night Comes, a subtle intervention into the gallery’s structure, in the form of a ventilation grille, alluding to Tarkovsky’s Solaris. ( The film was made at the same time as the Hawkwind album.) 

A four-metre neon horizon line drawn out in The Information is derived from a single line describing the sky in the frontispiece illustration from William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). 

Graham Gussin works in a wide range of media, including texts, drawings, film, video, sound and installation, to explore the perception of time, space and scale, where the realm of the imagination may be seen to spill over into reality.  His works frequently appropriate and manipulate images and literary narratives taken from art history, popular culture and cinema. 

Graham Gussin was born in 1960.  He lives and works in London.  He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Tate, Ikon and Chisenhale.  His work was most recently subject of a survey at Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.