Christopher Orr, Nothing Will Be As It Was, 2004. Courtesy Ringier Collection, Switzerland
Jem Charleston became one with nature at Dundee Contemporary Arts...
The new exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts, running until August 13 2006, sees the gallery bring together the work of nine different artists. Where The Wild Things Are explores the complicated relationship between humankind and nature, taking its title from the 1963 children’s book by Maurice Sendak.
In the book, a young boy dresses up as a wolf and goes out to ‘tame the wild things’, becoming king of their land. He adopts their behaviour and mannerisms, only to find that he misses his own habitat and wants to go home. The interplay of the human and non-human world of nature is the thread that ties this diverse exhibition together.
The most striking feature of the exhibition has to be Dave Allen’s sound installation, The Mirrored Catalogue d’Oiseaux (2002/2003) – the first work you reach upon entering the gallery. The installation is made up of a large aviary housing two long-tailed glossy starlings. French composer Olivier Messiaen’s piano suite ‘Catalogue d’Oiseaux’, based on real birdsong, plays in the background. Over the weeks the starlings, known for their mimicking abilities, will begin to imitate the sounds they hear.
“Messiaen mimics the birds’ song and then the birds mimic Messaian’s attempt to mimic their song,” explains Allen. “They return the original birdsong back to the wild - but it’s slightly modified."
"It’s all in the idea of possibility - it’s not an experiment to see if it works," he continued. "The birds will be quiet to begin with, but they will start to sing. Often, people take the time to sit for thirty minutes or so and they say they can hear the birds mimicking the music. It’s nice when you come across it.”
Dave Allen, The Mirrored Catalogue d’Oiseaux, 2002/2003. Courtesy the artist and Hans-Jürgen Wege, Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg
The exhibition continues with the almost geological drawings of Ilana Halperin who based her project on Ferdinandea, a volcanic island that emerged off the coast of Sicily in 1831, only to disappear months later. Halperin’s detailed drawings show land that looks like a microscopic view of human skin, full of cracks and crevices.
Another interesting series of works is by the Portuguese Indian artist Melanie Carvalho. Following a visit to Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens and inspired by 19th century illustrations of plants from the Dapin gardens on the south-west coast of India, Carvalho went on a search for sub-tropical flora that flourishes in southern Scotland, due to the Gulf Stream. Gorgeous and vibrant flowers leap out from dark backgrounds while a projection of Carvalho’s films runs in the next room.
Sound plays as important a part as vision in this show. Another sound installation, ‘For A Day Like Today (Spiritual Tree No.2, Thailand)’ (2004) by Henrik Håkansson, acts as a centrepiece for the main gallery.
The sound of crickets, recorded in Thailand, plays through tiny speakers hung on a full-size tree, standing on the gallery floor. The chirruping provides a soothing backdrop to the minimal arrangement of artworks on the gallery walls.
Artists The Lonely Piper and Christopher Orr explore the nature of folklore and the sublime in their canvases and collages spread throughout the gallery, while Duncan Marquiss focuses on the darker side of the wild, inspired by mythologies, hallucination and witchcraft.
Diana Thater, Perfect Devotion Two, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, London
Diana Thater’s film ‘Perfect Devotion Two’ (2005) sees the artist transport tigers into a controlled, man-made environment, capturing their reactions to their new habitat on 35mm.
Seemingly harmless, like a domestic cat, we watch a tiger playing with an over-sized red ball and drinking from a large pool but, somehow, the relationship between the wild cat and the objects is uncomfortable. Not unlike domesticated animals, these cats have a killer instinct, and so the ball becomes a kind of prey, just like a toy mouse or a ball of wool.
The exhibition reaches an unusual and quite amazing climax, coming full circle with Marcus Coates’s video ‘A Guide To The British Non Passerines’ (2001). In this amusing and impressive piece, Coates, dressed in a smart white shirt against a black backdrop, imitates all 86 species of non-perching wildfowl.
The artist may look normal before you put on the headphones, but when you come to listen it seems almost impossible that the strange bird calls are coming from his mouth. The juxtaposition of sound and vision is astounding, if not a little disturbing.
And so, the show takes us from animals that mimic classical music to humans that imitate birdcalls. While some pieces make us feel at one with nature, others question how close we truly can be; continually reassessing the precarious relationship between civilisation and the wild.
