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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Exhibition
Elizabeth Emanuel - Evolution
Verdict: Enigma and loss
London - The Muse - 21-25 Sep 04
Elizabeth Emanuel presents a startling exhibition about loss, grief, regeneration and obsession. It's in the form of an installation, film, and assemblies of drawn and collaged artwork.
The installation is a room open to walk into (and out of, as a £2,000 dress was stolen on the exhibition's second day), evidently a study, with desk and half-drunk whisky. There's a desk cluttered with writer's accessories, surrounded by pinned-up fragments torn from magazines, discarded (or preserved) dresses, photographs and strips of photographic negatives.
The atmosphere evoked suggests someone alive - the owner of the desk - and someone dead - the owner of the dresses. There's muted orange light from high-level tungsten lamps on film-set stands, giving an eerie and colour-distorting wash. There's a sound-track of hushed, sampled voices sounding like memories, laid on a base of flapping wings, rain and storm - placing the room in an Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft disintegrating mansion.
There's a feeling of the presence of death - or lingering life-in-death - emphasised by a couple of Miss Haversham-like off-white wedding dresses, with a slab of half-eaten cheese deputising for wedding-cake. It's exciting, in a stirringly forbidden way. There are no applied smells, but if there were, they'd be dry-rot and decay.
The cunning with which the senses are tricked - in reality it's a room in a brand-new art-gallery - comes from a strong unifying vision and some punctillious detail.
The desk, for example, seems a precisely-chosen item. It's post-war Utility, army-surplus, a couple of drawers - suiting the items placed on it. There's a Royal upright typewriter, not a computer, though other objects are modern - suggesting an age for the absent owner. A couple of oldish video-cameras, pre-DV; fabric shears; a black bakelite dial-telephone; gold 1950s soda-syphon; cigarette packets and ashtray full of filter-tipped stubs; two 1950s alarm-clocks; some half-drunk coffee and a bottle of Justerini & Brooks whisky.
A sheet of paper sits in the typewriter - others scatter the floor - the start of a novel of screenplay titled The Eye Of The Beholder.
It begins 'The golden early evening sun glints on the quiet surface of a lake.... a spider is building its web'. This signals an all-round feeling of relief - romantic fiction rather than Harold Pinter.
On the other hand, the author could be one of those blokes who writes Mills and Boon as a woman. And the level of fetish in the carefullly cut-out pictures of women lining the walls, and cut-up samples of their clothing is a bit too Brian de Palma to encourage hanging around waiting to meet him.
The dresses - strewn on chairs, hanging from the walls - show a matching level, this time at the micro-scale - for which the artist is well-known.
Above a buttoned-leather club chair, an empty bird-cage (she's flown), a couple of stacked paintings, a bench sewing-machine with pin-cushions and sheets of buttons (oh dear, he's making dresses as well, it's going to be that director coming out from behind a screen in The Producers) hangs a thrilling wedding-dress.
It's cream in heavy silk, billowing from the high waist (a sexy structure of wire and fabric formed to the shape of flowers, to peep almost garlanded above the breasts) with long train and a covering of light silk mesh, frayed to tatters at the base.
There's a theme of delicacy and fragility, exactness of textures and textiles - these words, and others such as destiny and transition, are used as slogans to link an array of designer's renderings of dresses along the walls leading to the installation room. On the opening night of the exhibition, there's also a film, shown on the gallery's front screen.
Each dress displayed is, from the nature of this designer, unique. If there's a unifying stamp it's the precision of minute detail, and the understanding of a woman's body-shape. These are not utility clothes, their effect is to fuse exactly with the body wearing them, and transform her.
Elizabeth Emanuel's use of sequins is well-known, often here combined with embroidery. But it's exactly what the sequins are doing that fascinates. Each is individually stitched to the fabric, often a silk mesh. And often individually coloured - making areas of graded colour, giving shape to the body, that changes with the reflection of light.
The installation's dresses are used to hint at the the character of the fictional woman who has gone.
One, modelled on a frame, would form her into the seductive shape of a mermaid, its shimmering sequins patterned to suggest fishes swimming as she moved. Another has a frisky bolero, another almost transparent below the top of the leg.
There are (almost) plunging and maidenly, modest necklines. There's delicate silk net, lamé, pearl buttons, chiffon, velvet, satin, old gold, fish netting, amber stones.
There's a dress inspired by roses - the set is filled with dead roses - in purples and golds, with gold silk thread, with areas shaped to fan out like flowers. There are violets and purples, the traditional colours of death; and one of lilac, symbolising spring.
The exhibition, complete in itself, also serves as a teaser for Elizabeth Emanuel's upcoming film Evolution / Eye of The Beholder. In which, perhaps, its secrets will be disclosed.
Credits: Artist - Elizabeth Emanuel. Eye Of The Beholder credits: Producer/Director - Elizabeth Emanuel. Production Manager - Alana Pryce. Production Assistant - Annelise Truss. Director of Photography - Tim Wooster. Cameraman - George Steel. Sound - Martin A Smith (Martin Smith). Gaffer - Wayne King. Set Design - Camilla Robinson, Caroline Howard. Wardrobe - Kevin Pratten, Richard Painting. Executive Producer - Damian Rayne. Runners - Sean McGlynn, Sara Shavel. Catering - Oystervan Jamie Pelly, Justerini & Brooks, Felix Von Geyer, Hugh Carling. Flower - Absolute Flowers. Lighting Equipment - Lee Lighting Ltd. Additional Props - Proportion. Printing - Albany House. Company - Collective Films.
END
John Park
reviewed Thursday 23 Sep 04 / The Muse
thanks to: Alana Pryce for fashion guidance
(c) Fringe Report 2004
There are two exhibitions in The Muse's main space. The other artist is Louisa Loakes.
For fashion as theatre see Fashion At Belsay
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
