The letting go –

24.11.07 – 20.01.08

Private View: Friday 23 November, 7 – 9.30 pm

This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

Emily Dickinson, 1862

T1+2 Gallery presents the first solo show of London-based artist David Birkin.  Combining photography with performance, the exhibition brings together three works that focus on the idea of release and the physical and emotional act of shedding.

For the series Confessions, Birkin asked members of his family to reveal a secret whilst sitting alone in a room facing a camera. When they were ready, they opened the shutter and when they were finished, they closed it again, so that the duration of the exposure was determined by the length of each person’s confession.  The large-format photographic prints provide the only residual trace, embodying a kind of wilful synaesthesia.  The works shift the viewer’s expectations of what might be interesting, from a natural, voyeuristic urge to know the specific content of the secrets, to a macro perspective.  The subjects’ individuality is eroded by the blurred record of their transience.  They become archetypes for their species: we read animal traits into the sitters, psychologically interpreting their body language in broad terms, assuming, projecting, imagining that a particular gesture or pose is defensive, or mournful, melancholy or introspective, and in that process paradoxically find some comfort and empathy in the universality of their responses, in the common ground of shared experience.

According to the Flesh (a recurring phrase of St Paul) consists of a series of high-speed video sequences recording the moment when a particular part of the body is either voluntarily or forcibly cast off.  The shedding of guilt mirrors the moulting of dead skin. Clipping a nail, plucking a hair, a tear or a drop of blood – banal grooming rituals acquire an epic and corporeal significance when slowed down under the scrutiny of a macro lens.

The last work, Thought, Word and Deed, is a site-specific, performance installation that pays homage to the history of the building in which the exhibition is housed: an old church hall in Bethnal Green. The work is constructed around the original confession box of St Matthew’s Church, into which members of the public are invited to take confession with a tape recorder in place of the priest.  On its journey from one reel to the other, the quarter-inch audiotape feeds out and around a magnet, destroying the recording as soon as it is created.

Next to the confession box is a simple sign – the sort that would normally read, “Quiet Please” – with the words from Dante:

 S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Canto XXVII

“If I thought my reply were to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement.  But since none has ever returned alive from
this pit, if what I hear is true, I answer thee without fear of infamy.”