A Throw of Fifteen-Love is an installation at 55 Gansevoort. A long panel of printed organza is held up by an adhesive plastic strip. It wraps round the space at eye height. It wraps walls, doors and door frames, stretches over pillars and into corners.The strip is lit, in places, by DIY-store up-lighters.
A continuous flow of images are printed on the organza. They show an apparently haphazard mix of interiors, exteriors and human form, all suggesting the idea of limits and boundaries. The viewers' eyes slip around the panel, following the linear accumulation of images. Nothing emerges as a singular, readable 'message'. Layers of visual and spatial information overlap.
The up-lighters are a reminder of an inhabited space. Placed on top of the images, they pull the viewer out of the organza visuals, and back into the space. They suggest an air of domestic, casual, informality. They push the images back, to an almost decorative status. They perpetuate a push and pull between dimensions and surfaces.
The title, A Throw of Fifteen-Love, refers to score keeping in tennis. Tennis is a conversation between players. It occurs in a space (a court) drawn by visual boundaries (lines). The game plays out through interdependent dynamics as the ball goes back and forth. The installation develops a similar conversation between the work, the space and the spectator.
The title also obliquely refers to Mallarmé's poem 'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance'. This poem questions the relationship between content and form, and speaks of a sort of looping, both physical and abstract. Above all, A Throw of Fifteen-Love highlights the viewer in action, as a player, engaged in a recurring activity, like hitting a ball and getting it sent back over the net.
Ariane Schick (b. 1984, Ashford, UK) graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent exhibitions include Smart Objects (Los Angeles), MOT International (London) and Super Dakota (Brussels). Ariane is represented by Super Dakota (Brussels).
The exhibitions at 55 Gansevoort are fully visible, at all hours, by peering through the windowed doors.