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| THE TIME MACHINE (after H.G. Wells) white oak, black stain and wax 106.7 x 99.1 x 45.7 cm - 42 x 39 x 18 inches edition of 3 + 1 AP (1/3) 2013 |
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| Installation view (downstairs gallery) |
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| Installation view (upstairs gallery) |
Tim Rollins is not an artist I had read about until seeing his current show, a collaboration with the members of K.OS. (Kids of Survival) at Maureen Paley. Rollins was once assistant to Joseph Kosuth. His practice combines art making with lessons in reading and writing for kids from the Bronx who in his words "had been written off by the school system." (He had taught at a Bronx school in the 1980s and established the organisation Art and Knowledge.) Rollins and K.O.S. use classical music and canonical Western literature as a point of departure for investigations into painting and sculpture. The current exhibition is inspired by H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) traveling backwards and forwards through decades and centuries as they imagine what they term as "visitations" with Shakespeare, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Darwin and Strauss. These encounters exist beyond space and time; one work compresses the year 1590 (the year Shakespeare penned A Midsummer Night's Dream), with the year 1826 when a seventeen-year-old Mendelssohn wrote the score for a production of the same. In the downstairs gallery the compression is further pressurised by Rollins' and K.O.S. invitation to young people to transform themselves into Shakespeare's Puck, decorating copies of the composers' sheet music with flowers and blossoms. In the upstairs gallery a series of collages made with double page spreads in Wells' novel are duplicated and inverted creating mirror images of one another reinforcing the idea of a collapsed sense of narrative, time and space.
Here's a link to Mendelssohn's music
