Andrew Power
Termini
- Charles Rea
- Belkin Satellite, 10 September to 16 October 2005
With Mirror Maze (2001), Charles Rea presents five convex mirrors—devices more typically found in commercial parking garages or in the corners of convenience stores—stationed at even intervals about the Belkin Satellite’s anteroom. Recontextualized in the gallery space and largely detached from their industrial lexicon, Rea’s mirrors are patterned with variants of a concentric maze. The design is described in the literature attendant to the exhibition as unicursal, that is, a maze with a single linear solution. Mirror Maze renders the unicursal route as evolute spirals transiting from margin to centre, and back.
Although it demands at least a few attempts, these unicursal routes eventually unwind to a single line between end points. Forward, or reverse, constrained on the path, there is, in effect, no correct direction. With motive effort a terminus is always obtained. This transitive solution seems important to Rea. Its simplicity is perhaps posed as a counterpoint to the critical mass of referential activity found in the exhibition’s accompanying work Crystal Lab.
With Crystal Lab (2003) Rea shifts conceptual focus from the centric radial geometry of the subtended sphere to an extensible, regular and transparent coordinate grid. Working at multiple scales simultaneously, that is, working architecturally, Rea extrudes a vertical dimension with sheets of hand-painted Plexiglas, again provisioning a maze of unicursal type, simplified for the roving perspective of the perambulant. In Crystal Lab the unicursal diagram is projected topologically, as a single contiguous surface and, in this case, not onto the finite surface of a sphere, but rather a flattened plane whose horizon infinitely recedes.
Installed in the centre of the gallery’s larger exhibition room, Crystal Lab is comprised of forty-eight transparent Plexiglas panels set within a supporting framework of prefabricated powder-coated steel sections. The structure forms a large, flat truss, taller than the viewer and recumbent on the floor. Remarkable in the sheer extent of its one hundred and seventy linear feet of hand-painted Plexiglas folded and filling the room, Crystal Lab’s transparent panels each present a monochromatic image. For example, a group of isometric projections detailing space-lattices; a bar chart ranking the population of Canadian provinces by gender; a work-flow model theorizing a relation between perceptual and linguistic faculties; and an arrangement of enlarged ASCII characters comprising a crude smiley-face.
Many of Crystal Lab’s illustrations may be easily apprehended. Some have at least a familiar diagrammatic syntax. Others lack the descriptive context adequate to render them sensible. And a few are so obscure as to be mysterious. The images all have the flavour of appropriation, as if sampled from reports and textbooks, perhaps from print outs discarded on the floor at a university computer room. However, the fit within their frames is too neat. The layout of the diagrams is noticeably careful. Compositions do not bleed past their margins, nor do they often fail to fill available space. Rea inflects his illustrations with considered manipulation, subtly aggravating their provenance, perhaps intentionally eroding their explicit meaning even beyond the distanciation enforced by their topical specificity.
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About this Article
Termini was first published in Fillip 2 in Winter 2006. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Andrew Power is a Vancouver-based media artist. He studied architecture at the University of Waterloo, and Fine Arts at Emily Carr Institute. Andrew is interested in science, and favours sentimentality.
Notes
image: Charles Rea, Mirror Maze (2000), acrylic on security mirrors
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