Of Ghosts and Atlases
– Dr Jess Berry
“The
more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me
that the past had actually happened in this or that way.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo[1]
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo[1]
Glen Skien’s Mytho-poetic
project is a constellation of postcards, letters, photographs, drawings and
objects that the artist stitches together and obscures through the processes of
etching, drawing, collage and construction. Fish and birds, boats and houses,
solitary figures and cryptic inscriptions appear frequently as myths and icons.
These motifs are highly evocative of familiar places, lost encounters, life
histories, and autobiographical chronicles. The secret intimacies and fugitive
relationships he intuits between these ephemeral sources are repetitively
re-configured across the artist’s oeuvre. Each of Skien’s exhibitions is a
reminder of past spaces and relationships, where traces of previous works are
phantoms in the present. The result is a meandering and melancholic narrative
of absence, displacement and loss, underlying which, is the spectre of History
- a silent presence that is constantly circled around and gestured toward.
Skien’s work is a metaphoric atlas of sorts - an on-going
mediation, through montage, on the mnemonic image and its relationship to the
ghostly. As such it has strong resonances with the projects of a number of
European artists, poets and scholars who have organised word and image in such
a way as to reveal a model of historic consciousness. The art historian Aby
Warburg’s image clusters of photographs, newspaper articles and ephemera that
make up the philosophical Mnemosyne Atlas
(1924-1929); Walter Benjamin’s unfinished meanderings on city life, in the
palimpsest text The Arcades Project (1927-1940);
author W.G Sebald’s use of personal photographs and interior prose in his elliptical
treatment of the Holocaust in Austerlitz (2001); and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962- ) of photographs, sketches
and newspaper clippings that are the source material for much of his work; each,
in some way, undertake a detached and oblique mapping of Europe’s traumatic
history and its reverberation in the present.
As with the afore mentioned atlas cartographers, Skien’s
images of the past are fleeting, recuperated from lost and forgotten sources. However,
his is not a specific history of place and time, but rather an understanding of
history as a process of destruction and fragmentation – a strange space where
memory, fiction, reality and dreams intersect. Despite the possibility for
sentimentality that is associated with the images and iconography that Skien
works with, there is little room for nostalgia, rather, there is something
disquieting in the way the artist obliterates elements of the past with slashes
of red ink, roughly hewn sutures of thread or opaque layers of encaustic. In
their reconfigured state the original images become almost unrecognisable,
echoing the way memory plays the game of Chinese whispers, obscured by what we
know and see later.
Thus, Skien mobilises his ghostly atlas of images, objects
and texts to remind us that history is an apparition of the disappeared and the
departed. While we might be confounded by the obscurities of these histories, ultimately
there is some comfort in knowing that in the case of Skien’s work these
narratives will resurface in some form again and eventually we might better
understand them better.
This is a wonderful review!
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