Shadows of Ideas 1989
Santa Monica Art Gallery, Santa Monica, Cal USA
Medium :- Acrylic, Wood, Canvas and Theatrical Lights.
Dimensions :- w6m b4m h3m.
LA Weekly ART PICK OF THE WEEK March 10 - 16 1989
Peter Frank
"I do not think of this space as a room," Nicola Atkinson - Griffith(1) has written about her latest installations, Shadow of ideas. “It is neither indoors or outdoors. It is an investigation of structures expansive and confining.” And , she might have added, reassuring and confusing, alluring and repelling. Taking off from the Regency architecture and design with which she was familiar enough in her native England, Atkinson – Griffith created a space in which vivid colours and insistent patterns cover most surfaces, and the scale relationships of recognizable things – chairs, tables, fences – don’t compute even though everything fits together formally. It’s not a Pee-wee Herman stage-set-cum-funhouse. Atkinson – Griffith’s has constructed; it’s something more restrained, goofy in a sly, almost sinister way. What is it about Shadow of Ideas about that perturbs beneath the wit and gaiety? “The scale of childhood” hints the artists. “What was it like to first see your mother’s skirt, or rug, or your first patch of wallpaper? Ordinary things, made fantastical by the impression of a first experience…a sense of reminiscence,” she continues, “ and melancholy and loss” There is definitely something Proustian in Atkinson – Griffith’s vocabulary of recognizable, but perhaps not identifiable, shapes; they recollect not objects per se but our memories – especially preliterate memories, memories accrued at that time in our infancy before we could name and categorize the world’s contents but were first felling the urge to name and categorize. We may not share Atkinson – Griffith’s specific recollections (Regency homes do not comprise the bulk of America’s hosing stock), but we did all start out as children; the fears and obsessions that now burden us first trained themselves on the banal particulars of the out side world at this point in our development, prefiguring ideas and still lurking as shadows in the recesses of our recall.
later Nicola Atkinson Davidson (1)
Sponsors :- Santa Monica Art Gallery
