BORDER-WALL
Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs
Coffeeismycupoftea Space, 103b Dalston Lane, E8 1NH
8 March- 7th April 2019.
#Borderwall
‘Artistic production is nodal, networked, and a perpetually unfinished project, things nudging each other, domino effects transpiring. The real-world analogue of this is that in an artist’s studio, it’s always a transitional moment: the detached artwork as standalone statement is a falsity, a piece of theatre. In reality, one thing leads to another, all kinds of ambient forces shaping what’s made’(Martin Herbert).
For their exhibition Border-Wall, Davis and Hibbs present a new wall-basedwork created from their collaborative sculptural installation ‘Border Controls’. This work is made up of modular parts; steel frames and mirrored elements that reflect both one another and reconfigure the surrounding space, acting as an endlessly changing composing device as the viewer navigates the work. For the work Border-Wallthe sculpture has been re-staged in multiple new configurationsin the artists’ studio and photographed in a process of transfer from the physical to the endlessly mutable digital space. Re-assembling the sculpture digitally is a further play on the works potential toconfound the boundaries between both real and illusory space. Here borders are permeable; multiplethresholds cross and overlap in a state of flux and collapse which both transforms and disorients. Alongside the new piece ‘Border-Wall’ they present related individual artworks that have informed their collaboration.
Within the shadow of increasingly restricted borders and political control, regarding migration and the increasing isolationism seen both here in the UK (with Brexit) as well as the wider geographical concerns in Europe and America,. The personal and political dimensions of art-making and authorship can be seen as pertinent to wider social concerns and questions that address the dynamics of power, autonomy and control. Davis and Hibbs collaborations centre around shared themes, overlapping research interests and ongoing conversations into one another’s practices. Both have independent careers but also are a couple who share a studio, where the inevitable questions arise about how, why and where to set boundaries. Their individual practices share common references to the social, political and aesthetic agendas encoded within architectural structures and in different ways renegotiate the visual and ideological legacies of modernism to probe both real and idealised notions of space. They create different kinds of structures where the potential for interpretation or reading of context is contingent on the audiences’ individual and relational responses.
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