Roy Voss
Matt's Gallery, London, UK
Roy Voss, 'Pine' (2008), installation view
Walk from behind the heavy, painted backdrop into the exhibition space at Matt’s Gallery and Roy Voss’s installation appears sparse. Such immediate emptiness can feel alarmingly oppressive.
Initially attention is drawn to the two floor-to-ceiling black and white photocopies of mountain ranges that seem to stretch out endlessly in front of you. At the bottom of these photographs you can make out roughly-made support structures that hold up large white letters. Both of these signs spell out ‘Come’ – a simple entreatment of the tourist board for you the viewer to visit this epic beauty. Only when you turn the corner of this thin, crudely finished wall do you see its pendant, with ‘There’ spelt out in the same direct manner. ‘Come There’, it reads on this new completion. Grammatical folly of a poorly thought-out tourism campaign or a linguistic microcosm of the unsolvable divide between reality and fiction? There is, of course, a place you will never be, in that as once you arrive it becomes here – it is a never attainable eventuality.
The great outdoors and the country living ideals that are peddled by tourist boards are rare – if not totally unrealistic – examples of living closer to nature. Voss gestures toward either a bygone era or a more saccharine version of a place barely in existence outside of our nostalgic imaginings. The addition of text returns the image to the lexicon of advertising, the view becoming less about the documentation of natural beauty and more about offering a product for consumption. The mountains are so nondescript that they could stand for the Scottish highlands as easily as they could for the Colorado Rockies.
These prospects are all staged within subtly delineated spaces that use the language of set-design to create vast spaces from minimal structures. Within this a simple code of situation unfolds: cables on the ground suggest sea; tall wooden platforms become land; objects that stand on these platforms are creatures or man-made constructions. The scene is laid out as one might imagine a future natural history museum might render disappeared surroundings, with evidence gleaned from the historical dregs found in photographs, back gardens, attics and the fading memories of those old enough to piece together its decaying story. It is fragmented and incomplete, without veneer or polish, and punctuated by the paraphernalia of sentimental living – where objects are kept long after luster fades. Ceramic figurines, as well as carvings of animals, lighthouses and wooden boats, have been crudely attached to light fittings. The light bulbs that engulf the ornaments and make them functional beacons of bright and unforgiving light underpin in my mind Voss’s evident kinship with the craft of isolation – the kind of satisfying hotchpotch that occurs when ideas are in abundance and the wanton use of pristine materials is not. Voss’s exhibition sets a timely question as to where a real symbiotic relationship with nature can sit within our need to market and take all kinds of experience as a packaged and consumable product.
Ilsa Colsell
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