Many Minute Attentions
7 Jul—4 Sep 2021Many Minute Attentions arises from ongoing correspondence and the discovery of shared affinities between the artists John Stezaker and Alison Turnbull, who were invited to collaborate as part of Large Glass’s 10-year anniversary celebrations.
These conversations, across painting, colour, rhythm, and music, have shaped a group exhibition of works within the field of abstraction, in which intimacy of scale and an engagement with multiplicity tend to an experience of perceptual immensity.
Many Minute Attentions draws its title from a poem by Alice Oswald, where she also speaks of ‘many tunnels into deep space’. Shared characteristics of precision, intricacy and gestural repetition seem to open out onto ambiguity. As Alison Turnbull writes:
Here image is privileged over process, contingency asserts itself and ideas dissolve in the face of the sensual force fields of colour, surface and changing light.
Abstraction’s desire for immersion – to lose oneself in the optical field – gives way to an incessant sense of doubt. Small-scale work, primarily by women artists, resides in ‘that ambiguous border zone between vision and illusion’, John Stezaker writes. A perceptual doubling characterises each of these works, disavowing the harmony of wholeness. Instead, we encounter ‘a series of restless incompatibilities, promising detachment just as much as mainstream abstraction promises immersion.’
These conversations, across painting, colour, rhythm, and music, have shaped a group exhibition of works within the field of abstraction, in which intimacy of scale and an engagement with multiplicity tend to an experience of perceptual immensity.
Many Minute Attentions draws its title from a poem by Alice Oswald, where she also speaks of ‘many tunnels into deep space’. Shared characteristics of precision, intricacy and gestural repetition seem to open out onto ambiguity. As Alison Turnbull writes:
Here image is privileged over process, contingency asserts itself and ideas dissolve in the face of the sensual force fields of colour, surface and changing light.
Abstraction’s desire for immersion – to lose oneself in the optical field – gives way to an incessant sense of doubt. Small-scale work, primarily by women artists, resides in ‘that ambiguous border zone between vision and illusion’, John Stezaker writes. A perceptual doubling characterises each of these works, disavowing the harmony of wholeness. Instead, we encounter ‘a series of restless incompatibilities, promising detachment just as much as mainstream abstraction promises immersion.’
Liz Deschenes, Tess Jaray, Jane Harris, Sasha Holzer, John Stezaker, Alison Turnbull
Curated by
Alison Turnbull and John Stezaker
Curated by
Alison Turnbull and John Stezaker