STANDARD
David Dale Gallery (with Ditte Gantriis)
see all images here.

The title of the exhibition, siphoned from a line in Roxy Music's 1973 hymn to the banality of the domestic sublime In every dream home a heartache, is a problematic term. When the intimate collides with the notion of industrial and commercial standards, contradictions emerge within the fragile yet ubiquitous nature of these signifiers. Exploiting their familiarity and resulting malleability, Deschamps and Gantriis' work opens up the gaps in those generic aesthetics – allowing their materials and form to act as an unspoken common language, and entrance point, each employing greatly disparate methods.

Deschamps' industrially enamelled abstract sculptures, involving a process generally reserved as a protective finish for consumer goods and signage, stand there blank and silent. Their forms recalling boxes, signs or packaging, they wait to be decorated or emblazoned with the text or image that would make them so familiar. The walls of the space are punctuated by almost imperceptible plaster motifs, all of which are created using a scaled-up version of an erasing shield, a tool designed to erase prescribed shapes in technical and architectural drawings. These marks, suggest current use of plaster, as a concealer and a material to repair. In erasing physical imperfections through a template this process of industry, through the forms it creates, recalls traditions of fresco or stucco used as ornament and decoration in architecture. Language, underlying most of Deschamps' works, is here subject to a process of deconstruction and abstraction, as it is mainly the material properties of words, letters and signs that interest her- using them as a space to collapse, conceal or inhabit.

Ganrtiis' large wall based works further investigate the medium of corporate or commercial aesthetic. Utilising industrial soundproofing boards, common in so many offices or shopping centres, Gantriis reworks them with imposing brushstrokes. Using a combination of digital and hand produced marks, she further obfuscates the intent, hiding the gestural act for it to become subsumed back into the bland background it originated. Existing between the setting of these boards and the artistic act forced upon them, the works become a tautology of self-referentiality, constantly referring back to a confused parallel history – neither the commercial nor the artistic can emerge.

Both artists work in abstracting the commonplace, and shifting focus on the familiar. Somewhere between forgetting a punchline and hiding an answer one commonplace is transposed to arguably another.


fortuna—post, Inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth, (Edition of 20), 35 cm x 35 cm, 2012.

photo credit: Max Slaven