BIZARRE ART
Turner
profile: Catherine Yass
Photos from L to R: #1. Catherine Yass. #2. Fiona Banner.
She has exhibited
widely, both nationally and internationally, since the early 1990s, and was
commissioned to create a new video work for the opening of Walsall's New
Gallery in 2000, presenting a unique portrait of the area. A solo exhibition
followed at London's Jerwood Gallery in 2001, and she represented the UK at
the 10th Indian Triennial, with two series of work relating to Indian cinema,
created during her stay in Bombay. Yass has a unique method of combining two
identical photographic images, one on positive film, and the other on positive
film presented as a negative. The effect on the photographs, which are
presented as transparencies in lightboxes, heightens the colours and turns any
light areas into an array of glowing blues - a technique Yass discovered by
accident at college. She specialises in exploring the psychology of spaces,
and in 1994 worked in a psychiatric hospital in south London to produce a
series of eight lightboxes called Corridor, which were eerie representations
of institutional space. She then moved onto architectural subjects, such as
Welsh steel mills, the thermal baths at Baden-Baden, Japanese dormitory
capsules, and in 1999, a series called Toilets.
Yass,
who is 39, also produced a series of lightboxes depicting portraits of Indian
celebrities, called Star. The portraits were presented alongside four images
of the empty cinemas which the actors will eventually fill with their screen
presence, and are intended to question whether it is possible to distinguish
between the person and the icon.
Photo:
Descent: HQ3 by Catherine Yass.
Fiona Banner
Her first solo
exhibition was in 1994 at the capital's City Racing venue. The possibilities
of language - and its limitations - lie at the heart of her work. The
36-year-old, who lives and works in London, creates text-based pieces,
drawings, sculpture and sound, and she attempts to encapsulate action and time
in a single form. Feature films form the source of most of her work. Her
wordscapes - or "still films" - are blow-by-blow accounts of entire movies,
retold in her own words.
Her
1994 work, The Desert, retells Lawrence of Arabia using a vast plane of text
similar in scale to a cinema screen - or an expanse of desert.
In
1998 she exhibited a series of giant full stops in various different fonts,
carved out of polystyrene. The viewer was forced to negotiate the full-stops
which were placed on the gallery floor, intented to punctuate the space as
they would a block of text. Her recent show Your Plinth Is My Lap featured
"space confusers" - large paper works cut into strips and hung away from the
wall to resemble blinds.
Banner's Stainless Steel Full Stops
Photo: Concrete Poetry and
Trixie from Your Plinth is My Lap.
Photo: Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery,
London