Articles
ESSAY BY JAMIE FLETT
06/09/07
Rowan Paton Risby by Jamie Flett
Rowan is fascinated by the real world’s capacity for the fantastical, in fact its continuous tendency towards the ‘sur’-real. Her reaction borders sometimes on the actual creation of a fantasy, a second and further reality to escape to but is always unavoidably tied to an interaction with other human beings and objects, their idiosyncrasies and humorous details catching her attention.
While the end results may seem at times to be a document of ‘another’ place its elements do come from the one we inhabit as in Room?(5) where a jumble of consumer durables connect to delineate the otherwise undefined space. In more ways than just using elements of different rooms to make a new one, this piece has echoes of Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? his collage made on the edge of Pop Art in 1956.
The Pop references continue in Cynic with a nod in the direction of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (date?) but here the humour and irony really supplant any statement about consumerism, the Art world itself and the connection between the two that Warhol may have been trying to make. In the heart shaped arrangement of the boxes the more ambiguous realm of subjective emotions, the ‘personal,’ takes precedence over the ‘objectivities’ of an intellectual, political or social statement. However, Warhol (or at least his assistants) actually constructed the Brillo Boxes, this was part of the point then but here they are ‘readymades’ in the tradition of Duchamp. The mundane object is transformed by altering its context, or at least its implications are.
Process also uses ready made toy men which at first glance look like toy soldiers but in fact seem to be workmen of some kind. Depicted in stark red and yellow so hardly naturalistic and arranged in a parabolic line sinking into their plinth they are imbued with a kind of ‘formal’ purpose as if in compensation for the fact that they have been removed from their familiar context so that their slightly ballet-like movements have been stripped of their original practical purpose. In this work and also in others like Prescription and Numbered bands we come across the propensity for collecting similar elements together (something Duchamp and other Surrealists were tempted by now and then) in this case perhaps to highlight their idiosyncrasies; these collected things look to be all the same but are they? Rowan may also be betraying a wish to impose some kind of order on her confusing surroundings; that slightly obsessive streak in most of us that makes us try to tidy up the loose ends and get things squared away. Perhaps superficially the world can be made to make a little more sense when we can classify things and put them in their proper place.
As for the collage-like technique of the paintings, it moves off in its own direction where we end up with a fairly minimal result. These images have the same kind of formal elegance as the more sculptural pieces but there seems to be the suggestion of much bigger spaces that the ‘details’ in them inhabit. We come across small (though perfectly formed!) aeroplanes in curiously empty, cloudless skies, perhaps challenging us as to the importance of each element in the general scheme of things, or this could be another fantasy; of the jetset lifestyle and first class travel. After all one of the planes looks like it has the outline of Concorde. In another depiction we have high-rise buildings existing without a city around them and in yet another there are hills without a landscape to support them. These details seem to be our only points of reference in a kind of ‘non-space’ which really charges them since they are the only thing that reminds us that these are paintings about the world of people and things. It is possible that the space or non-space is deliberately contrived to not restrict our reaction to two or even three dimensions. This could be meditative space like that found in a Rothko or a Barnett Newman where his ‘stripes’ charge the space like the space charges the details in Rowan’s work.
Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra said that the music they had been playing was expressing “…ordinary perception aestheticised.” He was also concerned with the essential inseparability of Art and life and I think there are parallels with Rowan where instead of creating a world beyond, a ‘sur’-reality she is perhaps trying to articulate a heightened version of this one, a ‘super’ reality.