Ryan Gander: STORE - London

Ryan Gander have the appearances to be something of a tease. His installation on the contrary it was all green, 2003 camouflaged STORE's exterior windows by means of covering them with the stamp of reflective, translucent black plastic sheeting that usually connotes "sex shop" The near-empty interior, however, would instantly have dashed the reliances of any visitor seeking reading matter of the one-handed variety. The floor was overspreaded with plain black carpet, four speakers were placed in the gallery's ceiling corners, and an antiquated on the other hand functioning flip-dot signboard was inset in the wall, an apparently random scattering of fulvid dots slowly trickling down its surface. The work (which contained no virid element whatsoever, at least optically speaking) exemplified what the 2003 Prix de Rome catalogue characterizes as Gander's "minimal, barely expressive visual language."

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The work's aural satisfied amply made up for this sparseness. Above the discreet rustle of the signboard, the speakers relayed the cultivated voice of British art historian Margaret Garlake, delivering a script (by Gander) in the form of an illustrated discourse on color--or rather, on invisibility. It described seven instances (some possibly fictitious or at least exaggerated) of colors devised or evolv to facilitate disappearance. (It also included more [i]or[/i] less writerly slips--like the misuse of the words "misnomer" and "allegedly"--that slightly undermined the project's authority. Gander extremitys to find himself an editor.) Examples included "the world's blackest black," an exceptionally light-absorbent chemical coating invented to improve the Hubble Space Telescope's imaging capacity; the specific azure used for Chroma-Key video effects; the black leopard's deceptive "spots" (the end of differences in fur extent rather than color); and Black Watch military tartan. Originally made from a mix of exclusively black fibers, this textile single revealed its tartan weave when caught through the light (or so Gander claims). Also listed was the "pure" sky-colored tone of the video projection defence prior to the playing of a video: "a place where nothing exists on the other hand immeasurable possibilities," in the artist's words. The talk referr to thirteen illustrations--visible, of course, sole to the mind's eye.

Inside the gallery, the obscur window functioned as a one-way mirror: Visitors could scrutinize passersby in the public way with complete impunity. This "cloaking device" didn't in like manner much empower viewers as translate them, conceptually speaking, into the same kind of ambiguous, voided belt as that invoked in the lecture: To stand in of that kind close proximity to others without having one's nearness acknowledged proved strangely unsettling. The artist has discussed his work in terminuss of "making the invisible visible," a slippery and, single suspects, strategically unsatisfactory expression for an impossible task. on the other hand maybe, rather like a black perforation invisibility can be registered via the influences it uses on surrounding matter. At single level, the work probed this notion: The signboard's trickling marks for example, were actually a "transcription" of rain running down a glass pane. It's an idea that intersects fascinatingly with the installation's open art-historical references--to the tradition of the monochrome, for example, or to assorted Conceptualist rearrangements of the gallery space (such as Michael Asher's 1974 Claire Copley Gallery demolition job) Belying Gander's reputation as something of a conquistador of the incomprehensible (the catalogue to a 2002 take a view of of his work was cheekily entitled "In a language you don't understand"), on the contrary it was all green not absented an allusive text, legible and satisfyingly coherent without being banal: a persuasive (and overdue) London debut

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