JOHN SMALLEY
artist / teacher
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I n v e n t i o n s / I n t e r v e n t i o n s
La fin de siècle
Collage 2021
P e i n t u r e s / D e s s i n s
C o l l a g e s / A s s e m b l a g e s
d e J o h n S m a l l e y
1 - 8 Août 2021
Espace Saquet, place du clos, St. Pierreville, Ardèche
En combinant des éléments de représentation et d'abstraction, d'observation et d'imagination, cette exposition explore les intersections entre nature et culture, rêve et mémoire, le vu et le signifié.
Cinq personnages dans un paysage ardèchois
graphite sur panneau de bois 2020
An introduction to I n v e n t i o n s / I n t e r v e n t i o n s
To Chart the Uncharted
Collage 2020
Our world is a vast and mysterious place. Our present “knowledge” of it is extensive, but, remains incomplete and in some respects woefully inadequate. The advances made during the past several hundred years in the Sciences: in medicine, astronomy and physics, in engineering, in digital technologies, and many others fields have been enormous and extraordinary in their scope. We have explored and examined NATURE and the physical world with a determination and commitment never witnessed before in the history of mankind. But because we are greedy, we have also made a habit of exploiting what we have learned and have unfortunately become both arrogant and wasteful.
Knowledge is power, and tragically, absolute power seems to corrupt absolutely. Rather than consciously becoming the “stewards” of this world and it’s bountiful riches, we have increasingly competed with one another in a race to use up the earth’s natural resources…
It is becoming obvious that our civilization has in many ways over-reached its ambitions… We seem to be standing on the threshold of a precarious situation….. will Nature have the last word? This vast, complex and interlinked “system”, which is our earth, will continue, with or without us until it is, in the scale of cosmic time, swallowed by the fires of our own sun. In the meantime, we create our own fires...
But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves! In this exhibition, I want to celebrate the fruits of our culture, our arts, our literature, our spirituality.
When we have created great architecture, it has been in part because we have imagined it, we have dreamed it into being. The same is true with theatre, music, dance, and the visuals arts. Our literature and our visual and performing arts are also in part the result of dreaming, but also of remembering. And memory is a powerful tool, when allied with imagination… And then, when I am visiting a site such as the Cistercian Abbey of Mazan, in the Ardèche, I become aware of a moment in time in which spirituality helped to guide communities towards living in harmony with the environment, while also fostering an “aesthetic” and a way of being which encouraged quiet contemplation and reflection.
The Cistercians created an architecture which quite literally “signified” their beliefs and their approach to life. Here in this room, I want to celebrate both the “seen” and the “signified”… through observation and through imagination, through memory and also through the mysterious processes of abstraction…
Ghosts: Collage with 19th century Stereoscope photographs 2020
Drawing has always been a basic and instinctive medium for our consciousness. Thirty-three thousand years ago, in the caves of Chauvet, in the Ardèche, our Neolithic ancestors made lively and extraordinarily accurate drawings of the animals they depended upon for their survival. Drawing has always been “a way of thinking” and of “signifying” what is important to us. Those beautiful, ghostly cave drawings represent another significant and extended moment in human history and in mankind’s enduring need to question the visible……
In this exhibition, I use drawing to conjure up, to visualise, and then to celebrate images of our cultural inheritance. With only a pencil, I can create visions of time and place, often in obsessive detail: The great wooden spire of Notre Dame, now tragically lost. The Ardechois montagnards, perched high and proud among the stones of their native ground. The ritual “shaking of the Black Walnut tree” in the rural midwest of America… a diagram of the Unité, the great French sailing ship, captured and commandeered by the British, to become the HMS Surprise… (is this a metaphor for British arrogance which trickles down to our present Brexit moment?) The large unfinished image of an ancient Yew tree, its roots sunk deep into the earth…And as I draw, I dream, I contemplate, I calculate, I measure, and I interpret…
Other mediums are represented here, including painting, collage, and sculptural assemblage. In the Espace Saquet gallery space, I’m setting out to create an environment full of quiet dialogues between images and objects, relating to the exhibition's central themes: intersections between culture and nature, dream & memory… interventions in the presentation of “cultural artefacts”: photographs, lithographs, diagrams and blueprints, architectural fragments/ornaments, clocks, measuring devices, lenses of various kinds ( allowing the viewer a sense of experiencing a kind of detached objectivity ), and elements of the NATURE MORTE… invented puzzles & games, reconstituted book covers, letter form(font) arrangements/configurations, fragments of 18th century French land obligations and Huguenot hymn books and music manuscripts… the idea is to begin to address the scale of “what man hath wrought” over time, within his relationship with Nature… the poetics of this relationship, the role of imagination ( and it’s sidekicks, humour and satire ), in it’s ongoing construction… there is certainly a sense, here of creating a kind of " museum in miniature”, a little Kunstkammer of sorts…
Intervention: reconstituted title page to La Maison des Troubadours by Andrée Vertiol
Sculptural assemblage:
Tarnished silver tea cup and saucer atop black mourning plinth with cameo tintype image of Aunt Esther within… A sudden and unexpected meeting of eyes… producing a simultaneous harmony and dissonance… with just a hint of sweet melancholia…
Inventions:
Three miniature games of chance… these are made from 1930s puzzles...the checkerboard puzzle parts are made of waterproof floatable material and were meant to be solved by children while playing in the bathtub…
Intervention/ assemblage:
Reconstituted fragment of a 19th century accounts book page from John Deane’s Grocery, County Mayo, Ireland
Sculptural assemblage:
Madame et Monsieur
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Upper left: Constellation: 19th century ebony dominoes mounted on Claude Glass black mirror, Wooden Diamond Puzzle, 1830s Gothic Revival lithographs forming a “typology” of church carvings…