Cornelia Parker's practice provides aesthetically demanding, insightful interruptions of the familiar. Once described as a "waste product from conservation" (a pertinent compliment, to my mind), her work plays with peripheral debris of the everyday. Her enquiring appropriation of found objects is not superficial, nor is it wholly reliant on the governing command of the gallery space. It is through her multifaceted exploration of the ubiquitous, be it a garden shed (Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View) or collated and crushed silver objects (Thirty Pieces of Silver) that she challenges her viewer to think, and look, again. Embryo Firearms, a notable work from 1995, presents a pair of flat moulds of an American Colt 45: a poignant piece which, in the artist's words, conflates "the idea of birth and death in the same object." Here, the emergent pistol appears uncertain – as if the viewer still has time to stop its membrane mounting, its cell-wall from solidifying, into its deadly, adult form. Guns and people are inseparable, it quietly reminds us.
Cornelia Parker, Unsettled
Parker's latest work, currently on show at Frith Street Gallery, once again showcases the artist's preoccupation with movement, process, and the unseen, creating intriguing dialogues between abstraction and representation. Through a combination of intricately positioned found objects, and deftly juxtaposed photographic works, the one-room display showcases encounters with the street in London and various sites in Israel. The first work, Unsettled, is a disquieting and poetic piece. Easily disregarded as a stack of abandoned wooden fragments piled up against the wall awaiting collection, the viewer slowly becomes aware that the various wooden forms are neither touching the floor or wall, but are intricately suspended on multiple vertical wires. When we learn that the wooden structures were found and collected by the artist on the streets of Jerusalem, the "unsettled" assembly becomes charged with suggestion. Other key works include a series (presented in a grid) of photographic works entitled Prison Wall Abstract (A Man Escaped). Again, the viewer is initially challenged, and the rich, textural digital prints of images of the filled-in cracks on the prison walls of Pentonville appear as beautiful painted abstractions. Here, purposeful, decaying walls for the containment of social menace become (when detached from their context) platforms of gesture and freedom.
A major new book – Cornelia Parker by Iwona Blazwick (with extensive commentaries by the artist, and an introduction by Yoko Ono) – accompanies this engaging show and in which the artist again proves with humour, acumen, and discerning observation to be an artist of substance and relevance.
Frith Street Gallery: http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/shows/
Cornelia Parker continues until July 27.
Stephanie Hesz is a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialized in art museum history and theory, contemporary public art, and memorials. She has worked and lectured at a number of art institutions including The Royal Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, and MoMA, New York. Currently living in London, she works as an art history educator and writer. She is Akimblog's UK correspondent and can be followed @stephaniehesz on Twitter.
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Cornelia Parker at Frith Street Gallery in London, UK
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